Currently argparse has a 'version' action which can be triggered by user defined options which prints out a custom string.

parser.add_argument("--version", action="version", version="test 1.2.3")

Since the 'version' action can be added multiple times, it can be used to output different kinds of information, like the program's license.

parser.add_argument("--license", action="version", version="This file is licensed under GPL.... [a huge amount of text]")

The only drawback is that linebreaks are substituted with a normal space. So I propose a 'print' action (perhaps as a replacement for 'version'?) which respects whitespace characters.

parser.add_argument("--version", action="print", message="test 1.2.3")
parser.add_argument("--license", action="print", message="This file is licensed under GPL.... [a huge amount of text, now properly formatted!]")
parser.add_argument("--insult-me", action="print", message="You sick *peep* , *peep* yourself in *peep*")

Currently, the only solution is to create a custom action which is IMHO a bit overkill for just printing a simple string to stdout.