What I have when creating a parser based off of cmd.cmd2 for a program here is the relevant code

        parser = cmd2.argparse_custom.Cmd2ArgumentParser(description='open', add_help=False)
        open_mission_args.add_argument(
            '-o', '--open',
            action='store',
            type=str,
            metavar='NAME',
            default='',
            dest='open',
            help='create and open new mission'
        )

Basically I want to set the name with running myprogram --open=<my_name> for my name I have to have it support all names with alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores. Everything works except myprogram --open=-- it is parsing this as [] I am assume it thinks I am starting a new argument is this a bug I thought the type=str, argument took care of this.

Edit the only thing I can think of that would work is nargs=argparse.REMAINDER but that would require post parsing which I don't want to do.