Convert hyphens to underscores.

[audy]

Just a suggestion.

Python's argparse automatically converts hyphens to underscores.

I think this behavior would suit optparse because column names containing hyphens can't be subsetted the same way as underscores:

library(optparse)

option_list <-  c(make_option('--some-option'))

parser <- OptionParser(option_list = option_list)

options <- parse_args(parser)

print(options$some-option) # crashes

print(options$[,'some-option']) # ugly

print(options$some_option) # nice

What do you think? I could write the code and send you a PR if you agree.

[trevorld]

Well, you can still do:

print(options$`some-option`)

Although that is still a little awkward. A quick look online shows that optparse users are defining options like --some-option so I'm hesitant to make a change that breaks their scripts since I've marked optparse as a stable API since late 2012.

[audy]

If only R had versioned dependencies.

You could make it backwords compatible by adding the hyphenated option. But that could still break things.

[trevorld]

Yeah, not sure if it is worth implementing at this point since it could break people's programs and too minor of a change to justify creating a optparse2 package. Would have been a great idea 4-5 years ago.

NB. the argparse package already does this (although it has a Python dependency):

> library("argparse")
Loading required package: proto
> parser = ArgumentParser()
> parser$add_argument("--test-arg")  
> parser$parse_args(c("--test-arg", "what"))
$test_arg
[1] "what"

[mavam]

Too bad this won't get fixed, I'll go with the workaround then: print(options$some-option)

[trevorld]

In the developmental version of optparse I've added an option convert_hyphens_to_underscores to parse_args which does what you want. I've also added the convenience warpper parse_args2 which wraps parse_args setting convert_hyphens_to_underscores to TRUE and positional_arguments to TRUE.