The best bet would be to write a patch to the optparse module. In the meantime, you can accomplish this with a slightly modified OptionParser class. This isn't perfect, but it'll get what you want done.
#!/usr/bin/env python
from optparse import OptionParser, Option, IndentedHelpFormatter
class PosOptionParser(OptionParser):
def format_help(self, formatter=None):
class Positional(object):
def __init__(self, args):
self.option_groups = []
self.option_list = args
positional = Positional(self.positional)
formatter = IndentedHelpFormatter()
formatter.store_option_strings(positional)
output = ['\n', formatter.format_heading("Positional Arguments")]
formatter.indent()
pos_help = [formatter.format_option(opt) for opt in self.positional]
pos_help = [line.replace('--','') for line in pos_help]
output += pos_help
return OptionParser.format_help(self, formatter) + ''.join(output)
def add_positional_argument(self, option):
try:
args = self.positional
except AttributeError:
args = []
args.append(option)
self.positional = args
def set_out(self, out):
self.out = out
def main():
usage = "usage: %prog [options] bar baz"
parser = PosOptionParser(usage)
parser.add_option('-f', '--foo', dest='foo',
help='Enable foo')
parser.add_positional_argument(Option('--bar', action='store_true',
help='The bar positional argument'))
parser.add_positional_argument(Option('--baz', action='store_true',
help='The baz positional argument'))
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()
if len(args) != 2:
parser.error("incorrect number of arguments")
pass
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
And the output you get from running this:
Usage: test.py [options] bar baz
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-f FOO, --foo=FOO Enable foo
Positional Arguments:
bar The bar positional argument
baz The baz positional argument
