Parsing command line options with optparse module

In python, you can parse command line options as follows.

from optparse import OptionParser

def main():
# The entry point : obtain the password and connect database.

        parser=OptionParser()
        parser.add_option("-p", "--password", dest="input", help="input", metavar="INPUT_VAL")
        (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
        print ("options:", str(options))
        print ("arguments:", args)
        print options.input

main()

Note that options are stored in options and each option can be accessed by dest as string.