6.20.4.1 Defining a callback option
Description: Defining a callback option
Keywords: lib

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6.20.4.1 Defining a callback option

As always, you can define a callback option either by directly instantiating the `Option` class, or by using the `add_option()` method of your `OptionParser` object. The only option attribute you must specify is callback, the function to call:

    parser.add_option("-c", callback=my_callback)

Note that you supply a function object here--so you must have already defined a function `my_callback()` when you define the callback option. In this simple case, `optparse` knows nothing about the arguments the -c option expects to take. Usually, this means that the option doesn't take any arguments - the mere presence of -c on the command-line is all it needs to know. In some circumstances, though, you might want your callback to consume an arbitrary number of command-line arguments. This is where writing callbacks gets tricky; it's covered later in this document.

There are several other option attributes that you can supply when you define an option attribute:

type
  has its usual meaning: as with the ``store'' or ``append'' actions, it instructs `optparse` to consume one argument that must be convertible to type. Rather than storing the value(s) anywhere, though, `optparse` converts it to type and passes it to your callback function.

nargs
  also has its usual meaning: if it is supplied and "`nargs > 1`", `optparse` will consume nargs arguments, each of which must be convertible to type. It then passes a tuple of converted values to your callback.

callback_args
  a tuple of extra positional arguments to pass to the callback.

callback_kwargs
  a dictionary of extra keyword arguments to pass to the callback.