Argument with the name async

September 28, 2022

So I am using argparse and have an argument called async. The following code works in Python 2 but not in Python 3.8 and newer

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--async", action='store_true')
ARG = parser.parse_args()
if ARG.async:
   print("Async")

Unfortunatelly async seems to be a new keyword and there is SyntaxError on the line with if statement. How to solve when I don’t want to rename it?

>Solution :

You can specify an alternate internal name using the "dest" parameter. You’ll have to change the python code to use that new name, but the external "–async" signature does not change.

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--async", action='store_true', dest="use_async")
ARG = parser.parse_args()
if ARG.use_async:
   print("Async")