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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
(All of these result in
  options.filename == "outfile"
  options.verbose == 0
...just as you might expect.)

Even niftier, users can run one of

  yourscript -h
  yourscript --help
and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's optons:
  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

If you're using Python 2.3 or later and don't need the new features in Optik 1.5, you don't need to install anything: just import from optparse in the standard library.

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:

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

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.

Download

Please see the Optik download page.

Mailing list

The optik-users@lists.sourceforge.net list is for general discussion of Optik:

Related work

(I should have a list of competing option parsing libraries here... please email me if you want to add one!)