Issue #8982: Improve the documentation for the argparse Namespace object. (Merge from 3.2.)
diff --git a/Doc/library/argparse.rst b/Doc/library/argparse.rst
index ce21442..459647b 100644
--- a/Doc/library/argparse.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/argparse.rst
@@ -1310,13 +1310,24 @@
Namespace(accumulate=<built-in function sum>, integers=[1, 2, 3, 4])
-Custom namespaces
-^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+The Namespace object
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+By default, :meth:`parse_args` will return a new object of type :class:`Namespace`
+where the necessary attributes have been set. This class is deliberately simple,
+just an :class:`object` subclass with a readable string representation. If you
+prefer to have dict-like view of the attributes, you can use the standard Python
+idiom via :func:`vars`::
+
+ >>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
+ >>> parser.add_argument('--foo')
+ >>> args = parser.parse_args(['--foo', 'BAR'])
+ >>> vars(args)
+ {'foo': 'BAR'}
It may also be useful to have an :class:`ArgumentParser` assign attributes to an
-already existing object, rather than the newly-created :class:`Namespace` object
-that is normally used. This can be achieved by specifying the ``namespace=``
-keyword argument::
+already existing object, rather than a new :class:`Namespace` object. This can
+be achieved by specifying the ``namespace=`` keyword argument::
>>> class C(object):
... pass
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index fe4c3ae..3ed93da 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -235,6 +235,10 @@
- Issue #9509: argparse now properly handles IOErrors raised by
argparse.FileType.
+- Issue #9348: Raise an early error if argparse nargs and metavar don't match.
+
+- Issue #8982: Improve the documentation for the argparse Namespace object.
+
Extension Modules
-----------------
@@ -1343,8 +1347,6 @@
- Issue #8374: Update the internal alias table in the :mod:`locale` module to
cover recent locale changes and additions.
-- Issue #9348: Raise an early error if argparse nargs and metavar don't match.
-
Extension Modules
-----------------