Question

I am writing a command-line plugin-based program where the plugins will provide additional functionality on top of whatever I provide.

So for example suppose I wrote a simple script that parsed images and stored them, and that’s all I do. Then someone else can write a set of scripts to manipulate the image, putting his scripts in a plugin.

The plugin would be loaded and users can access the plugin by specifying its name in the command line.

It is not uncommon for scripts to want to provide additional options for the user.
So suppose in some years, 20 different plugins have been written.

Now, all of the authors want to allow users to provide options, so the main engine should take the user’s options and pass them to the plugin so that it can handle them however it wants.

To keep it uniform, they might agree that certain options should perform a similar operation. Like “-o name” should set the output name to “name”. They would then go about implementing their own options and stuff, which the main engine does not know about (of course, it shouldn’t know what the plugins do)

I am using the deprecated getopt module, and it will throw exceptions whenever I specify an undefined option. I have heard of optparse and argparse, but I am not sure if these will allow the user to specify any options he wants without the code throwing an exception.

How can I make it so I can specify any command-line option?

Answer 1

argparse lets you partially parse an argument list with the parse_known_args method, returning what was parsed correctly, together with a list of the remaining arguments.