optparse does not save second whitespace into arg

Question

I am writing a regex match program, and I am unable to use regular expressions that start with spaces.

Is there any way to tell OptParse to only delimit by the first whitespace?

Answer 1

No, because the shell removes those spaces, not optparse. Python is handed a list of already-parsed command-line parameters.

Use quoting to preserve spaces:

./yourscript.py --option=" spaces in here "

To demonstrate, I created the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
print sys.argv

to show you what optparse sees:

$ ./demo.py     foo bar baz
['./demo.py', 'foo', 'bar', 'baz']

Note how the whitespace is all removed and three values are passed to the script. But with quoting:

$ ./demo.py "    foo bar" baz
['./demo.py', '    foo bar', 'baz']

the whitespace is preserved, and I joined two strings together into one as well.