In Python, how can we find out the command line arguments that were provided for a script, and process them?
Related background reading: What does "sys.argv[1]" mean? (What is sys.argv, and where does it come from?). For some more specific examples, see Implementing a "[command] [action] [parameter]" style command-line interfaces? and How do I format positional argument help using Python's optparse?.
One way to do it is using sys.argv. This will print the script name as the first argument and all the other parameters that you pass to it.
import sys
for arg in sys.argv:
print arg
I use optparse myself, but really like the direction Simon Willison is taking with his recently introduced optfunc library. It works by:
"introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser."
So, for example, this function definition:
def geocode(s, api_key='', geocoder='google', list_geocoders=False):
is turned into this optparse help text:
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-l, --list-geocoders
-a API_KEY, --api-key=API_KEY
-g GEOCODER, --geocoder=GEOCODER