Optik (aka optparse)

Introduction

Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line parsing library for Python. Using Optik, you can add intelligent, sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very little overhead. (And, since Python 2.3, Optik is now part of the Python standard library, under the name optparse.)

Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a simple script:

  from optik import OptionParser
  [...]
  parser = OptionParser()
  parser.add_option("-f", "--file",
                    action="store", type="string", dest="filename",
                    help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")
  parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet",
                    action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=1,
                    help="don't print status messages to stdout")

  (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the "usual thing" on the command-line:

  yourscript -f outfile --quiet
  yourscript -qfoutfile
  yourscript --file=outfile -q
  yourscript --quiet --file outfile

  options.filename == "outfile"
  options.verbose == 0

Even niftier, users can run one of

  yourscript -h
  yourscript --help

  usage: yourscript [options]

  options:
    -h, --help           show this help message and exit
    -fFILE, --file=FILE  write report to FILE
    -q, --quiet          don't print status messages to stdout

That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your command-line. See the documentation included in the package for details.

Requirements

Optik 1.5.1 requires Python 2.0 or greater (although I only tested it with 2.1 through 2.5a1).

As of Python 2.3, Optik is part of the standard library -- although it's now called optparse. For forwards compatibility with Python 2.3, the standalone Optik distribution also installs a module called optparse (Optik 1.4.1 or later).

Installation

Installation is easy; just use the standard incantion for installing Python modules:

python setup.py install

Documentation

If you're using Optik 1.5 (or optparse from Python 2.4), see the Optik 1.5 documentation directory.

If you're still using Optik 1.4 (optparse from Python 2.3), the Optik 1.4 directory here is much improved from the docs originally distributed with Optik (or Python).

Distributing Optik-Based Applications

Since Optik is now included in the standard library, you have a couple of options for distributing scripts that require Optik:

• continue to import from optik, and require that users install a particular version of Optik to use your application
• distribute your own version Optik as a sub-package of your library (e.g. SCons includes a package SCons.Optik in its own library)
• change your code to import from optparse, and simply require either Python >= 2.3 or Optik >= 1.4.1

If you choose the latter option, be careful about precisely which Optik features you use; I recommend one of the following approaches:

• code to Optik 1.4.1 and document that your application requires either Python >= 2.3 or Optik >= 1.4.1
• code to Optik 1.5 and document that your application requires either Python >= 2.4 or Optik >= 1.5
• code to Optik 1.5.1 and document that your application requires either Python >= 2.5 or Optik >= 1.5.1
  (subject to change pending final release of Python 2.5)

Author, copyright, & license

Optik was written by Greg Ward (gward at python dot net).

Copyright (c) 2001-2006 Gregory P. Ward. All rights reserved.

Optik is licensed under the BSD license; see the README.txt in the distribution for exact terms.

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Related work

• cfgparse, a config file parsing module that is modeled after and cooperates with Optik (Dan Gass ).
• optcomplete, a shell completion self-generator for Optik-based programs (Martin Blais )