Introspecting optparse/argparse objects

[Evan Driscoll]

I'd like to be able to be able to define options and then look at the
lists. (For a concrete idea of a use case, suppose that it did not
directly support the --help option and I wanted to write code that took
its place.) Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any public API for
doing this.

Even if I were to do something like
    options = [ make_option(...), make_option(...) ]
(using optparse) and could thus get a handle on the Option objects,
there doesn't seem to be a public API for retrieving stuff like the
actual options (though available via opt._short_opts and opt._long_opts).

This means that either I need to write my own wrappers around options,
option groups, and perhaps even an option parser, or I have to dig into
_variables _that _are _not _part _of _the _public _api. Both of those
choices are distasteful.

So,
1) Did I miss anything?
2) Is there some particular reason that this API *isn't* provided, and
if I asked for it I might get it in a future version?

Evan


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