optional arguments with compact reporting in optparse

[braver]

Posted to the Optik list, but it seems defunct. Optik is now Python's
optparse.

I wonder how do you implement optional arguments to Optik. I.e., you
can have an option

-P [file]

-- the filename is optional, with a default "data,pikl". It works as
follows:

-- if no -P is given, no pickle is written
-- if -P is given without the filename following, a pickle file is
written with the default name data.pikl
-- if -P filename is given, the pickle is written to filename

How do we do optional values in Optik, with nargs <= 1?

Another question I have it how can I output a docstring right from the
parser.add_option() block? I prefer to define all option-related
things in the same block once. I'd like to output the help value from
the block, or append it to a report.

Here's example from my Ruby wrapper for Ruby's optparse:

name = :divisor
help = "show divisor"
short = "-m"
opt.on(short, "--#{name} [STR]", help) do |val|
hash[:show_divisor] = true
hash[:divisor] = val if val
end
report << [name,short,help]

-- notice that my report list is built with the exact values of all
options, regardless of whether they're encountered or not. The I
simply walk through the report list to print a report for this run:

report.each do |name,short,help|
val = opts.name || "----"
STDERR.printf "--%s (%s)\t\%s\t%s\n", o, short, val, help
end if verbose

How can I group such reporting together with add_option in Optik?

Cheers,
Alexy

[Steven Bethard]

braver wrote:

Posted to the Optik list, but it seems defunct. Optik is now Python's
optparse.

I wonder how do you implement optional arguments to Optik.

You may want to check out argparse:

http://argparse.python-hosting.com/

It supports optional arguments like this::

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-P', metavar='file', nargs='?', const='data')
args = parser.parse_args()
if args.file is not None:
# -P was supplied, so do something with the file
# if no argument to -P was given, it will be 'data'

Another question I have it how can I output a docstring right from the
parser.add_option() block? I prefer to define all option-related
things in the same block once. I'd like to output the help value from
the block, or append it to a report.

Here's example from my Ruby wrapper for Ruby's optparse:

I don't understand what you want here (and I don't understand the Ruby
code). Can you try explaining what you're trying to do here a different
way?

STeVe

[braver]

Steve -- thanks for your pointer to argparse, awesome progress --
optional arguments.

However, I still wonder how I do reporting. The idea is that there
should be a list with tuples of the form:

(short, long, value, help)

-- for all options, regardless of whether they were specified on the
command line or not.

Moreover, a way to create such list should be incremental -- in ruby I
define things around each option definition and add a new tuple to the
reporting list right after the block defining the option.

The idea is, -- help should report on all options with their actual or
default values, and everything pertaining to one option -- its
definition, callbacks, and adding it to the reporting list -- must be
in vicinity of each other, so I don't forget to output some stuff
about an option ten options below... The snippet I've shown pretty
much does it in Ruby.

Ah, yeah, and another thing -- I want to define a module with about 10
options common for a project. Then I'd import it in scripts, and
there should be three things doable with the preexisting default
options:

-- turn off any of them
-- supply new defaults to any of them
-- add new options in the same way

Wonder how brave pythonistas do that!
Cheers,
Alexy