How can I get optparse's OptionParser to ignore invalid arguments?

Answer 1

By default there is no way to modify the behavior of the call to error() that is raised when an undefined option is passed. From the documentation at the bottom of the section on how optparse handles errors:

If optparse‘s default error-handling behaviour does not suit your needs, you’ll need to subclass OptionParser and override its exit() and/or error() methods.

The simplest example of this would be:

class MyOptionParser(OptionParser):
    def error(self, msg):
        pass

This would simply make all calls to error() do nothing. Of course this isn't ideal, but I believe that this illustrates what you'd need to do. Keep in mind the docstring from error() and you should be good to go as you proceed:

Print a usage message incorporating 'msg' to stderr and exit. If you override this in a subclass, it should not return -- it should either exit or raise an exception.

Answer 2

Per synack's request in a different answer's comments, I'm posting my hack of a solution which sanitizes the inputs before passing them to the parent OptionParser:

import optparse
import re
import copy
import SCons

class NoErrOptionParser(optparse.OptionParser):
    def __init__(self,*args,**kwargs):
        self.valid_args_cre_list = []
        optparse.OptionParser.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

    def error(self,msg):
        pass

    def add_option(self,*args,**kwargs):
        self.valid_args_cre_list.append(re.compile('^'+args[0]+'='))
        optparse.OptionParser.add_option(self, *args, **kwargs)

    def parse_args(self,*args,**kwargs):
        # filter out invalid options
        args_to_parse = args[0]
        new_args_to_parse = []
        for a in args_to_parse:
            for cre in self.valid_args_cre_list:
                if cre.match(a):
                    new_args_to_parse.append(a)


        # nuke old values and insert the new
        while len(args_to_parse) > 0:
            args_to_parse.pop()
        for a in new_args_to_parse:
            args_to_parse.append(a)

        return optparse.OptionParser.parse_args(self,*args,**kwargs)


def AddOption_and_get_NoErrOptionParser( *args, **kwargs):
    apply( SCons.Script.AddOption, args, kwargs)
    no_err_optparser = NoErrOptionParser(optparse.SUPPRESS_USAGE)
    apply(no_err_optparser.add_option, args, kwargs)

    return no_err_optpars