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6.21.5.1 Adding new types

To add new types, you need to define your own subclass of `optparse`'s Option class. This class has a couple of attributes that define `optparse`'s types: `TYPES` and `TYPE_CHECKER`.

`TYPES` is a tuple of type names; in your subclass, simply define a new tuple `TYPES` that builds on the standard one.

`TYPE_CHECKER` is a dictionary mapping type names to type-checking functions. A type-checking function has the following signature:

    def check_mytype(option, opt, value)

where `option` is an `Option` instance, `opt` is an option string (e.g., `"-f"`), and `value` is the string from the command line that must be checked and converted to your desired type. `check_mytype()` should return an object of the hypothetical type `mytype`. The value returned by a type-checking function will wind up in the OptionValues instance returned by `OptionParser.parse_args()`, or be passed to a callback as the `value` parameter.

Your type-checking function should raise OptionValueError if it encounters any problems. OptionValueError takes a single string argument, which is passed as-is to OptionParser's `error()` method, which in turn prepends the program name and the string `"error:"` and prints everything to stderr before terminating the process.

Here's a silly example that demonstrates adding a `complex` option type to parse Python-style complex numbers on the command line. (This is even sillier than it used to be, because `optparse` 1.3 added built-in support for complex numbers, but never mind.)

First, the necessary imports:

    from copy import copy
    from optparse import Option, OptionValueError

You need to define your type-checker first, since it's referred to later (in the `TYPE_CHECKER` class attribute of your Option subclass):

    def check_complex(option, opt, value):
        try:
            return complex(value)
        except ValueError:
            raise OptionValueError(
                "option %s: invalid complex value: %r" % (opt, value))

Finally, the Option subclass:

    class MyOption (Option):
        TYPES = Option.TYPES + ("complex",)
        TYPE_CHECKER = copy(Option.TYPE_CHECKER)
        TYPE_CHECKER["complex"] = check_complex

(If we didn't make a `copy()` of `Option.TYPE_CHECKER`, we would end up modifying the `TYPE_CHECKER` attribute of `optparse`'s Option class. This being Python, nothing stops you from doing that except good manners and common sense.)

That's it! Now you can write a script that uses the new option type just like any other `optparse`-based script, except you have to instruct your OptionParser to use MyOption instead of Option:

    parser = OptionParser(option_class=MyOption)
    parser.add_option("-c", type="complex")

Alternately, you can build your own option list and pass it to OptionParser; if you don't use `add_option()` in the above way, you don't need to tell OptionParser which option class to use:

    option_list = [MyOption("-c", action="store", type="complex", dest="c")]
    parser = OptionParser(option_list=option_list)