.. -- mode: rst --

======== Opster

Opster is a command line options parser, intended to make writing command line applications easy and painless. It uses built-in Python types (lists, dictionaries, etc) to define options, which makes configuration clear and concise. Additionally it contains possibility to handle subcommands (i.e. hg commit or svn update).

.. image:: https://secure.travis-ci.org/piranha/opster.png :target: https://travis-ci.org/piranha/opster

Supported Python versions: Python >= 2.6 (including 3.x)

Quick example

That's an example of an option definition

.. code:: python

import sys from opster import command

@command() def main(message, no_newline=('n', False, "don't print a newline")): '''Simple echo program''' sys.stdout.write(message) if not no_newline: sys.stdout.write('\n')

if name == 'main': main.command()

Running this program will print help message::

./echo.py echo.py: invalid arguments echo.py [OPTIONS] MESSAGE

Simple echo program

options:

-n --no-newline don't print a newline -h --help show help

As you can see, here we have defined option to not print newline: keyword argument name is a long name for option, default value is a 3-tuple, containing short name for an option (can be empty), default value (on base of which processing is applied - see description_) and a help string.

Underscores in long names of options are converted into dashes.

If you are calling a command with option using long name, you can supply it partially. In this case it could look like ./echo.py --no-new. This is also true for subcommands: read about them and everything else you'd like to know in documentation_.

.. _documentation: http://opster.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ .. _see description: http://opster.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html#options-processing