Question: I want to pass a list of names into my program written in Python from console. For instance, I would like to use a way similar to this (I know it shouldn't work because of `bash`):

```
$ python myprog.py -n name1 name2

```

So, I tried this code:

```
# myprog.py

from argparse import ArgumentParser

parser = ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-n', '--names-list', default=[])
args = parser.parse_args()

print(args.names_list) # I need ['name1', 'name2'] here

```

That led to the error:

```
usage: myprog.py [-h] [-n NAMES_LIST]
myprog.py: error: unrecognized arguments: name2

```

I know I could pass the names with quotes `"name1 name2"` and split it in my code `args.names_list.split()`. But I'm curious, is there a better way to pass the list of strings via `argparse` module.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer: 
You need to define `--names-list` to take an arbitrary number of arguments.

```
parser.add_argument('-n', '--names-list', nargs='+', default=[])

```

Note that options with arbitrary number of arguments don't typically play well with positional arguments, though:

```
# Is this 4 arguments to -n, or
# 3 arguments and a single positional argument, or ...
myprog.py -n a b c d

```
You need to use `nargs`:

```
parser.add_argument('-n', '--names-list', nargs="*")

```

<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#nargs>