14.3.3.2 Populating the parser

There are several ways to populate the parser with options. The preferred way is by using OptionParser.add_option(), as shown in section 14.3.2, the tutorial. add_option() can be called in one of two ways:

• pass it an Option instance (as returned by make_option())

• pass it any combination of positional and keyword arguments that are acceptable to make_option() (i.e., to the Option constructor), and it will create the Option instance for you

The other alternative is to pass a list of pre-constructed Option instances to the OptionParser constructor, as in:

option_list = [
 make_option("-f", "--filename",
 action="store", type="string", dest="filename"),
 make_option("-q", "--quiet",
 action="store_false", dest="verbose"),
 ]
parser = OptionParser(option_list=option_list)

(make_option() is a factory function for creating Option instances; currently it is an alias for the Option constructor. A future version of optparse may split Option into several classes, and make_option() will pick the right class to instantiate. Do not instantiate Option directly.)