Andy Kannberg wrote: > Hi python-guru's, > > I am new to Python, coming from a long history of Unix/linux shell > programming. > I am creating a Python script (In Python 2.6) which should be able to > read command line options and arguments. > So far, I figured out how to do that with optparse. I can add options (and > arguments ) . > There are about 7 options that can be selected. > > However, I can't seem to figure out how to force that only one option is > allowed when the script is invoked. In other words: How to restrict the > script to accept only one of the available options ?
You have to do it manually, like in the example http://docs.python.org/2.6/library/optparse.html#how-optparse-handles-errors if options.a and options.b: parser.error("options -a and -b are mutually exclusive") which could be generalized to (untested) option_names = ["foo", "bar", "baz", ...] toggled_options = [name for name in option_names if getattr(options, name)] if len(toggled_options) > 1: s = repr(toggled_options).strip("[]") parser.error("options %s are mutually exclusive" % s) If you are not restricted to the standard library use https://pypi.python.org/pypi/argparse which was added to the stdlib in 2.7 and has "mutually exclusive groups", see http://docs.python.org/2/library/argparse.html#mutual-exclusion -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
