6.21.3.7 Parsing arguments
The whole point of creating and populating an OptionParser is to call its parse_args() method:
(options, args) = parser.parse_args(args=None, options=None)
where the input parameters are
- the list of arguments to process (
sys.argv[1:]by default) - object to store option arguments in (a new instance of optparse.Values by default)
and the return values are
- the same object as was passed in as
options, or the new optparse.Values instance created by optparse - the leftover positional arguments after all options have been processed
The most common usage is to supply neither keyword argument. If you
supply a values object, it will be repeatedly modified with a
setattr() call for every option argument written to an option
destination, and finally returned by parse_args().
If parse_args() encounters any errors in the argument list, it calls the OptionParser's error() method with an appropriate end-user error message. This ultimately terminates your process with an exit status of 2 (the traditional Unix exit status for command-line errors).
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Release 2.4.4c1, documentation updated on 11 October 2006.