Re: formatting paragraphs in descriptions

On 23 May 2003, Wannheden, Knut said:
> - At first I couldn't find the command description option for the
> OptionParser, as it isn't used anywhere in the basic and advanced guides.

Huh?  I don't understand what you're talking about -- could you be more
specific?

> - Optik doesn't provide any mechanisms to parse the positional arguments.  I
> know this has discussed before and I've read the threads.  Maybe this could
> be introduced incrementally.  To start with I think it would be nice if
> Optik could check that the number of positional arguments is correct.
> Currently I do this right after the parse and call OptionParser#error(msg)
> if it is incorrect.

That's gotta be the #1 most requested feature.  OK, OK, I'll do
something about it, but not until *after* Optik 1.4.2 and Python 2.3 are
released.

> - The OptionParser#error(msg) function uses the get_prog_name() function to
> determine the program name to prepend the message with.  It would be nice if
> this could be set somehow.  I'd like this because I use subcommands.

Already fixed in CVS; will be in Optik 1.4.2 (and Python 2.3final
hopefully!).

> Further I noticed that the HelpFormatter uses the textwrap module to format
> the help messages.  textwrap is documented to work with individual
> paragraphs.  I think it would be nice if the default HelpFormatter could
> identify paragraphs in the command description and format these individually
> and preserve the paragraphs.

Your command description is probably too long.  Write a man page.  ;-)

> Also a newline between the description and
> option help would be nice.  For this purpose I implemented my own
> HelpFormatter which preserves any \n\n sequences in the description and adds
> a newline to the end to the description.  What do you think about this?  If
> you like I could send you my code that does this, but it's really trivial
> :-)  Almost forgot, my HelpFormatter does one more thing: It sets the
> default width to 79 characters, as I in Windows command prompts can end up
> with an empty line inside the paragraph.

Hmm, default width should be slightly < 80... but it isn't!  I never
noticed that before.  I'll set it to 78 just because I don't like odd
numbers.  ;-)

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <[email protected]>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
A day without sunshine is like night.


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