Optik 1.5a1 =========== 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. 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", dest="filename", help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE") parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet", action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=True, 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 which result in the 'options' object looking like this: options.filename == "outfile" options.verbose == 0 Even niftier, users can run one of <yourscript> -h <yourscript> --help and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's options: usage: <yourscript> [options] options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -f FILE, --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. AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY ------------------------------- Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward@python.net> Optik 1.5a1 can be downloaded from: http://optik.sourceforge.net/Optik-1.5a1.tar.gz http://www.gerg.ca/software/optik/Optik-1.5a1.tar.gz More information can be found at: http://optik.sourceforge.net/ http://www.gerg.ca/software/optik/ Copyright (c) 2001-2004 Gregory P. Ward. All rights reserved. CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.5 (since 1.4.1) ---------------------------------- * Optik now requires Python 2.2 or later. * Add expansion of default values in help text: the string "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of that option's default value, or "none" if no default value. * SF bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False). * SF bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'. * SF feature #815264: change the default help format for short options that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting. * SF patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user- targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). Also added po/ directory for message catalog and translations, so that Optik-based applications have a single place to go for translations of Optik's built-in messags. Include translations for Danish and German (thanks to Frederik S. Olesen and Martin v. Löwis respectively), and partial translations for French (by me). * SF bug #878453 (Python): respect $COLUMNS environment variable for wrapping help output. * SF feature #964317: allow type objects to specify option types; allow "str" as an alias for "string". * SF feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings. (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.) * Added HTML-formatted docs to the source distribution (in addition to the reStructuredText source files). * Added three new examples: custom_source.py, custom_type.py, and no_help.py. -- Greg Ward <gward@python.net> http://www.gerg.ca/ I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat---