I'm trying to create a Pacman wrapper in Python. I'm having trouble to parse the arguments in the same way Pacman does. (Described at https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8)
In order to parse the arguments, I need to create a sub parser that starts with a dash. E.g. Pacman allows us to do:
$ pacman --database --asdeps which
Here --asdeps is specific to the --database operation. The following is invalid, if I use the --files operation instead of --database:
$ pacman --files --asdeps
error: invalid option '--asdeps'
Python has the feature request Issue 34046: subparsers -> add_parser doesn't support hyphen char '-' - Python tracker, which was rejected.
Is there some way I can do this with argparse? Or is there some other more flexible argument parsing library, short of parsing the arguments manually?
Update I'm guessing in this case, that parsing arguments manually isn't too bad, as the manual says the operation must be the first argument. This makes sense for Pacman and for argparse. Otherwise argparse can't easily know if a flag is the name of a sub command, or an argument of that sub command.