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With Python's optparse module, how do you create an option that takes a variable number of arguments?

Asked 2009-06-22T01:28:04.753
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With Perl's Getopt::Long you can easily define command-line options that take a variable number of arguments:

foo.pl --files a.txt             --verbose
foo.pl --files a.txt b.txt c.txt --verbose

Is there a way to do this directly with Python's optparse module? As far as I can tell, the nargs option attribute can be used to specify a fixed number of option arguments, and I have not seen other alternatives in the documentation.

python optparse
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I believe optparse does not support what you require (not directly -- as you noticed, you can do it if you're willing to do all the extra work of a callback!-). You could also do it most simply with the third-party extension argparse, which does support variable numbers of arguments (and also adds several other handy bits of functionality).

This URL documents argparse's add_argument -- passing nargs='*' lets the option take zero or more arguments, '+' lets it take one or more arguments, etc.

answered 2009-06-22T01:41:19.937

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