I'd like to have an argument to my program that has some required parameters along with some optional parameters. Something like this:

[--print text [color [size]]

so you could pass it any of these:

mycommand --print hello
mycommand --print hello blue
mycommand --print hello red 12

There could be multiple of these so it has to be a single add_argument. For example:

[--print text [color]] [--output filename [overwrite]]

I can achieve arguments that are close to what I want:

>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> act = parser.add_argument('--foo', nargs=3, metavar=('x','y','z'))
>>> act = parser.add_argument('--bar', nargs='?')
>>> act = parser.add_argument('--baz', nargs='*')
>>> parser.print_help()
usage: [-h] [--foo x y z] [--bar [BAR]] [--baz [BAZ [BAZ ...]]]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --foo x y z
  --bar [BAR]
  --baz [BAZ [BAZ ...]]

but not quite. Is there any way to do this with argparse? I know I could make them all nargs="*" but then --help would not list the names of the optional arguments. If I pass nargs="*" and a tuple for metavar, argparse throws an exception.

python argparse
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