Arbitrary command line arguments in python

Question

I want to allow arbitrary command line arguments. If the user provides me with a command line that looks like this

myscript.py --a valueofa --b valueofb posarg1 posarg2

I know that a was passed with valueofa, b passed with valueofb and that I have these last two positional arguments.

I've always used optparse, for which you specify exactly which arguments to look for. But I want the user to be able to define arbitrary "macros" from the command line. Surely there's a python module that does it more elegantly than anything I'd write. What is?

Answer 1

Sadly, you can't. If you have to support this, you'll need to write your own option parser =(.

Answer 2

Will argparse do what you want? It was recently added to the standard library. Specifically, you might want to look at this section of the documentation.