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

[Steven Bethard]

Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com> added the comment:

Thanks for the patch! One concern I have is that adding --help-options by default has the potential to break existing code, e.g. if someone using optparse or argparse was already defining their own --help-options flag. The backward compatible solution is to have --help-options disabled by default, and ask people to enable it with add_interface=True.

Comments on the argparse patch: I think it's probably overkill to create InterfaceFormatter - just do the appropriate formatting in the _InterfaceAction. I also wouldn't add format_interface or print_interface until someone requests them. Last nit: don't add the takes_value method, just inline your "self.nargs != 0" check in the one place you need it.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue4256>
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