Is there a way I can configure optparse in Python to not take the beginning -? So instead of
%program -d optionvalue
I get
%program d optionvalue
Currently, when I try to do
parser.add_option('d', '--database')
i get the following error:
optparse.OptionError: invalid option string 'd': must be at least two characters long
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
In short, no.
an argument used to supply extra information to guide or customize the execution of a program. There are many different syntaxes for options; the traditional Unix syntax is a hyphen (“-“) followed by a single letter, e.g. -x or -F. Also, traditional Unix syntax allows multiple options to be merged into a single argument, e.g. -x -F is equivalent to -xF. The GNU project introduced -- followed by a series of hyphen-separated words, e.g. --file or --dry-run. These are the only two option syntaxes provided by optparse.
http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html#terminology
You would have to parse that yourself.
parse_args() allows you to provide your own argument list, not just using sys.argv[1:], which it uses by default. So you could preprocess the commandline arguments, and then pass them to optargs. Assuming you want all 1-character arguments to count as option keys:
orig_args = sys.argv[1:]
new_args = []
for arg in orig_args:
if len(arg) == 1:
arg = '-' + arg
new_args.append(arg)
(options, args) = parser.parse_args(new_args)
(you could also subclass OptionParser and put it there)
You may be able to force with use callback action:
http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html#callback-example-6-variable-arguments
which gives you raw access to left and right args
dand valued? (e.g.program d d)