Parses command line options and parameter list. args is the argument list to be parsed, without the leading reference to the running program. Typically, this means sys.argv[1:]. shortopts is the string of option letters that the script wants to recognize, with options that require an argument followed by a colon (':'; i.e., the same format that Unix getopt() uses).

Note

Unlike GNU getopt(), after a non-option argument, all further arguments are considered also non-options. This is similar to the way non-GNU Unix systems work.

longopts, if specified, must be a list of strings with the names of the long options which should be supported. The leading '--' characters should not be included in the option name. Long options which require an argument should be followed by an equal sign ('='). Optional arguments are not supported. To accept only long options, shortopts should be an empty string. Long options on the command line can be recognized so long as they provide a prefix of the option name that matches exactly one of the accepted options. For example, if longopts is ['foo', 'frob'], the option --fo will match as --foo, but --f will not match uniquely, so GetoptError will be raised.

The return value consists of two elements: the first is a list of (option, value) pairs; the second is the list of program arguments left after the option list was stripped (this is a trailing slice of args). Each option-and-value pair returned has the option as its first element, prefixed with a hyphen for short options (e.g., '-x') or two hyphens for long options (e.g., '--long-option'), and the option argument as its second element, or an empty string if the option has no argument. The options occur in the list in the same order in which they were found, thus allowing multiple occurrences. Long and short options may be mixed.