14.3.3.2 Populating the parser

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14.3.3.2 Populating the parser

There are several ways to populate the parser with options. The preferred way is by using `OptionParser.add_option()`, as shown in section 14.3.2, the tutorial. `add_option()` can be called in one of two ways:

- pass it an Option instance (as returned by `make_option()`)

- pass it any combination of positional and keyword arguments that are acceptable to `make_option()` (i.e., to the Option constructor), and it will create the Option instance for you

The other alternative is to pass a list of pre-constructed Option instances to the OptionParser constructor, as in:

    option_list = [
        make_option("-f", "--filename",
                    action="store", type="string", dest="filename"),
        make_option("-q", "--quiet",
                    action="store_false", dest="verbose"),
        ]
    parser = OptionParser(option_list=option_list)

(`make_option()` is a factory function for creating Option instances; currently it is an alias for the Option constructor. A future version of `optparse` may split Option into several classes, and `make_option()` will pick the right class to instantiate. Do not instantiate Option directly.)