how do you directly call a python main function utilizing optparse?

Question

folks, i inherited a python script main using optParse to construct a menu of items for the user to pick through:

def main():
    
    parser = optParse(prog='script')
    #parser.add_option("-e","--repeat",dest="repeat",type=int,default=3,help="Total number of times to do the checking.")
    parser.add_option("-H","--time",dest="time", type='float', default=1.0,help="Time in hours to run the test.")

what need to do is to call this main function from within a running python session, but don't quite know how to specify the parameters. something similar to this:

import script
script.main(['-e', '5', '-H', '2'])

however, the main function has no input parameters as it is. What is the easiest way to modify main to accomplish passing parameters in the manner specified?

Answer 1

from the answer from Tim Roberts, the following works:

def main():
    parser = optParse(prog='script')
    #parser.add_option("-e","--repeat",dest="repeat",type=int,default=3,help="Total number of times to do the checking.")
    parser.add_option("-H","--time",dest="time", type='float', default=1.0,help="Time in hours to run the test.")
    sys.argv = ['scripyt.py', '-e', '5', '-H', '2']

then just calling the following from the running python session:

script.main()

Answer 2

Your parser needs a parse_args call, which from the docs looks like:

(options, args) = parser.parse_args(args=None, values=None)

args can be a list of strings. If it is None, it will use sys.argv[1:].

Sometimes the main is defined as

def main(argv=None): 
    parser = ...
    ...
    options, args = parser.parse_args(argv)

Then the main caller can either use

 main()    # or
 main(['-e','5'...])