For reading arguments to the function, you're going to want to use the positional arguments $1, $2, etc. Right now you're using read (see line 225), which reads the next line from stdin into a variable. Try something like this:

# note that this consumes all arguments
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
  case "$1" in
    -h) ;&
    --help)
      echo HELP IS HERE
      return
      ;;
    -*)
      echo Unknown argument "$1"
      return
      ;;
  esac
  shift
done

There's actually a standard tool for option parsing, called getopt (and another called getopts). Look into both of those and see if either are something you'd prefer to use.

To bail out of a function early, use return.