understanding OptionParser

Question

I was trying out optparse and this is my initial script.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, sys
from optparse import OptionParser

parser = Optio         


        

Answer 1

Just to illustrate the choices-option of argparse.ArgumentParser's add_argument()-method:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
from argparse import ArgumentParser
from datetime import date

parser = ArgumentParser()

parser.add_argument("-u", "--user", default="Max Power", help="Username")
parser.add_argument("-m", "--month", default="{:02d}".format(date.today().month),
                    choices=["01","02","03","04","05","06",
                             "07","08","09","10","11","12"],
                    help="Numeric value of the month")

try:
    args = parser.parse_args()
except:
    parser.error("Invalid Month.")
    sys.exit(0) 

print  "The month is {} and the User is {}".format(args.month, args.user)

Answer 2

Your solution looks reasonable to me. Comments:

• I don't understand why you turn month_abbr into a tuple; it should work fine without the tuple()
• I'd recommend checking for invalid month value (raise OptionValueError if you find a problem)
• if you really want the user to input exactly "01", "02", ..., or "12", you could use the "choice" option type; see option types documentation

Answer 3

optparse is deprecated; you should use argparse in both python2 and python3

http://docs.python.org/library/argparse.html#module-argparse