From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-01-09T06:34:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Needing Help with OptionParser

Alle marted́ 8 gennaio 2008, Bryan Richardson ha scritto:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm hoping someone can help me get around a problem I'm having.  I have a
> Ruby command-line program where I use OptionParser to parse the program's
> options.  This program is a wrapper for a bunch of other programs, each of
> which also accept command-line options.  A typical run command would look
> like this:
>
> #> wrapper_app --script-to-run MyScript --script-options "--input
> foo.txt--output
> bar.txt"
>
> Where the information passed with --script-options is the options to use
> for the script to be ran.  However, OptionParser in my main wrapper program
> attempts to parse the options given by --script-options and throws an error
> because they aren't valid options for the main wrapper program.  I was
> hoping that surrounding them in quotes would cause it to be seen as a
> single input string to --script-options but that doesn't seem to be the
> case.  Does anyone know how I can do what I'm trying to do?
>
> Thanks in advance!!! -- BTR

I had exactly the same problem once. With the help of some people on this 
list, I found the following solution:

require 'optparse'

option_parser = OptionParser.new do |o|
  o.on('-a', '--a-option', 'something'){}
end

unknown = []

begin
  option_parser.parse! ARGV
rescue OptionParser::InvalidOption => e
  e.recover ARGV
  #recover just put the unknown option back into ARGV, so I extract it
  #again and put it into unknown
  unknown << ARGV.shift

  #if ARGV still contains some elements, and the first one doesn't start
  #with a -, i.e is the argument for the unknown option, I remove it as 
  #well
  unknown << ARGV.shift if ARGV.size>0 and ARGV.first[0..0]!='-'
  # go on with parsing
  retry
end

p unknown

I hope this helps

Stefano