[New-bugs-announce] [issue4256] optparse: provide a simple way to get a programmatically useful list of options

[Andy Buckley]

New submission from Andy Buckley <andy at insectnation.org>:

optparse is a great option parser, but one thing that would make it even
greater would be if it provided a standard option (cf. --help) which
lists all the available options in a parseable form. Something prefixed
with --help, e.g. --help-options would be ideal since it doesn't clutter
the option namespace.

This would provide a simple command-line hook for e.g. bash completion
customisation with complete/compgen, which could then easily and
maintainably obtain the list of available switches via the
--help-options flag rather than hard-coding the option names or
attempting to grep the output of --help

It would also be good if the OptionParser provided a simple Python API
way to obtain the names of all option switches, rather than having to
loop over OptionGroups, calling the unadvertised 'option_list' and
'get_option_name' methods!

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components: Library (Lib)
messages: 75469
nosy: andybuckley
severity: normal
status: open
title: optparse: provide a simple way to get a programmatically useful list of options
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue4256>
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