argparse missing optparse capabilities?

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

I have optparse code that parses a command line containing
intermixed positional and optional arguments, where the optional
arguments set the context for the following positional arguments.
For example,

  myprogram.py arg1 -c33 arg2 arg3 -c44 arg4

'arg1' is processed in a default context, 'args2' and 'arg3' in
context '33', and 'arg4' in context '44'.

I am trying to do the same using argparse but it appears to be
not doable in a documented way.

Here is the working optparse code (which took 30 minutes to write
using just the optparse docs):

  import optparse
  def append_with_pos (option, opt_str, value, parser):
        if getattr (parser.values, option.dest, None) is None:
            setattr (parser.values, option.dest, [])
        getattr (parser.values, option.dest).append ((value, len
(parser.largs)))
  def opt_parse():
        p = optparse.OptionParser()
        p.add_option ("-c", type=int,
            action='callback', callback=append_with_pos)
        opts, args = p.parse_args()
        return args, opts
  if __name__ == '__main__':
        args, opts = opt_parse()
        print args, opts

Output from the command line above:
  ['arg1', 'arg2', 'arg3', 'arg4'] {'c': [(33, 1), (44, 3)]}
The -c values are stored as (value, arglist_position) tuples.

Here is an attempt to convert to argparse using the guidelines
in the argparse docs:

  import argparse
  class AppendWithPos (argparse.Action):
    def __call__ (self, parser, namespace, values,
option_string=None):
        if getattr (namespace, self.dest, None) is None:
            setattr (namespace, self.dest, [])
        getattr (namespace, self.dest).extend ((values, len
(parser.largs)))
  def arg_parse():
	p = argparse.ArgumentParser (description='description')
	p.add_argument ('src', nargs='*')
	p.add_argument ('-c', type=int, action=AppendWithPos)
	opts = p.parse_args()
	return opts
  if __name__ == '__main__':
        opts = arg_parse()
        print opts

This fails with,
  AttributeError: 'ArgumentParser' object has no attribute 'largs'
and of course, the argparse.parser is not documented beyond how
to instantiate it.  Even were that not a problem, argparse complains
about "unrecognised arguments" for any positional arguments that
occur after an optional one.  I've been farting with this code for
a day now.

Any suggestions on how I can convince argparse to do what optparse
does easily will be very welcome.  (I tried parse_known_args() but
that breaks help and requires me to detect truly unknown arguments.)

(Python 2.7.1 if it matters and apologies if Google mangles
the formatting of this post.)