14.3.3.7 Parsing arguments

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14.3.3.7 Parsing arguments

The whole point of creating and populating an OptionParser is to call its `parse_args()` method:

    (options, args) = parser.parse_args(args=None, options=None)

where the input parameters are

`args`
  the list of arguments to process (default: `sys.argv[1:]`)
`options`
  object to store option arguments in (default: a new instance of optparse.Values)

and the return values are

`options`
  the same object that was passed in as `options`, or the optparse.Values instance created by `optparse`
`args`
  the leftover positional arguments after all options have been processed

The most common usage is to supply neither keyword argument. If you supply `options`, it will be modified with repeated `setattr()` calls (roughly one for every option argument stored to an option destination) and returned by `parse_args()`.

If `parse_args()` encounters any errors in the argument list, it calls the OptionParser's `error()` method with an appropriate end-user error message. This ultimately terminates your process with an exit status of 2 (the traditional Unix exit status for command-line errors).