Question

For example, if I give

test.py -a SOMETHING 1 2 3  

after option parsing, I want two lists:

>> print opt
>> ['-a', 'SOMETHING']

>> print args
>> ['1', '2', '3']

Is it possible to do this using optparse?

Answer 1

Looking at the optparse documentation it seems like you can do this:

import optparse

parser = optparse.OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-a", action="store", type="string", dest="a")

(opt, arg) = parser.parse_args()
print "Opt:", opt
print "Arg:", arg

If I run this using your command line python test.py -a SOMETHING 1, 2, 3 it prints:

Opt: {'a': 'SOMETHING'}
Arg: ['1', '2', '3']

which seems very close to the desired result.

If you really must have the options as a list, you could add something like this to the code above:

o = list()
for k in vars(opt):
    o.append(k)
    o.append(getattr(opt, k))
print "List Opt:", o

For me this prints:

List Opt: ['a', 'SOMETHING']