I'm using a subparser/subcommand that has an alias.

I'm using the dest option for the subparser to store the name of the subcommand so I can get it later.

Currently if the subcommand's name is reallyLongName and the alias is r (say) then the dest option stores either reallyLongName or r exactly - whatever I typed in gets stored. This is annoying because I now have to check for the name of the command or any of its aliases in order to identify the command.

Is there a way to get argparse to store the subcommand's name in the dest field in some sort of single, canonical text string?

For example, given the following code:

import argparseparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest='command', help='sub-command help')parser_ag = subparsers.add_parser(  'mySubcommand',aliases=['m'],help='Subcommand help')print(parser.parse_args('mySubcommand'.split()))print(parser.parse_args('m'.split()))

the following output is produced:

Namespace(command='mySubcommand')
Namespace(command='m')

Desired result: command has a single, canonical value for both, for example:

Namespace(command='mySubcommand')
Namespace(command='mySubcommand')

There was a Python bug/issue requesting this - saving the 'base' name, rather than the alias. You can't change that without changing argparse.py code. I think the change would limited to the Action subclass that handles subparsers. https://bugs.python.org/issue36664

But I point out that there's simpler way of handling this. Just use set_defaults as documented near the end of the https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#sub-commands section. There

parser_foo.set_defaults(func=foo)

is used to set a subparser specific function, but it could just as well be used to set the 'base' name.

parser_foo.set_defaults(name='theIncrediblyLongAlias')