I've been using arparse with ConfigureAction (which is shown below). But, it doesn't play well with positional arguments. For example:
./plot_stuff2.py --plot stuff1 stuff2 [...] plot_stuff2.py: error: argument --plot/--with-plot/--enable-plot/--no-plot/-- without-plot/--disable-plot: invalid boolean value: 'stuff1' Problem is --plot takes an optional argument, and so the positional arg is assumed to be the arg to --plot. Not sure how to fix this. Here is the parser code: parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() [...] parser.add_argument ('--plot', action=ConfigureAction, default=False) parser.add_argument ('files', nargs='*') opt = parser.parse_args(cmdline[1:]) Here is ConfigureAction: ----------------------------------------------------- import argparse import re def boolean(string): string = string.lower() if string in ['0', 'f', 'false', 'no', 'off']: return False elif string in ['1', 't', 'true', 'yes', 'on']: return True else: raise ValueError() class ConfigureAction(argparse.Action): def __init__(self, option_strings, dest, default=None, required=False, help=None, metavar=None, positive_prefixes=['--', '--with-', '--enable-'], negative_prefixes=['--no-', '--without-', '--disable-']): strings = [] self.positive_strings = set() self.negative_strings = set() for string in option_strings: assert re.match(r'--[A-z]+', string) suffix = string[2:] for positive_prefix in positive_prefixes: self.positive_strings.add(positive_prefix + suffix) strings.append(positive_prefix + suffix) for negative_prefix in negative_prefixes: self.negative_strings.add(negative_prefix + suffix) strings.append(negative_prefix + suffix) super(ConfigureAction, self).__init__( option_strings=strings, dest=dest, nargs='?', const=None, default=default, type=boolean, choices=None, required=required, help=help, metavar=metavar) def __call__(self, parser, namespace, value, option_string=None): if value is None: value = option_string in self.positive_strings elif option_string in self.negative_strings: value = not value setattr(namespace, self.dest, value) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list