Parsing Command-Line Argument in Python

pyargs.md

Command-line arguments in Python show up in sys.argv as a list of strings (so you'll need to import the sys module).

For example, if you want to print all passed command-line arguments:

import sys
print(sys.argv)  # Note the first argument is always the script filename.

Command-line options are sometimes passed by position (e.g. myprogram foo bar) and sometimes by using a "-name value" pair (e.g. myprogram -a foo -b bar).

Here's a simple way to parse command-line pair arguments. It scans the argv list looking for -optionname optionvalue word pairs and places them in a dictionary for easy retrieval. The code is heavily commented to help Python newcomers.

"""Collect command-line options in a dictionary"""

def getopts(argv):
    opts = {}  # Empty dictionary to store key-value pairs.
    while argv:  # While there are arguments left to parse...
        if argv[0][0] == '-':  # Found a "-name value" pair.
            opts[argv[0]] = argv[1]  # Add key and value to the dictionary.
        argv = argv[1:]  # Reduce the argument list by copying it starting from index 1.
    return opts

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sys import argv
    myargs = getopts(argv)
    if '-i' in myargs:  # Example usage.
        print(myargs['-i'])
    print(myargs)

Running this script:

$ python main.py -i input.txt -o output.txt
input.txt
{'-o': 'output.txt', '-i': 'input.txt'}

Simple solution, but not very robust; it doesn't handle error checking and the like. So don't use this in production code! There are more complex alternatives available. Some modules to consider are:

• getopt
• optparse (deprecated since Python 2.7)
• argparse (recommended if you want something in the standard library)
• docopt (recommended if you're willing to use something not in the standard library)

This post was inspired by the book "Programming Python" by Mark Lutz.