Question

I am trying to use optparse (to parse command line options to my script) and fileinput (to have the flexibility to provide data input via pipe or file).

import optparse, fileinput

parser = OptionParser()    
parser.add_option("-v", action="store_true", dest="verbose")
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

for line in fileinput.input:
     process(line)

However fileinput tries to use the ‘-v’ option as well as file name resulting in ‘No such file or directory error’. So either I need to make fileinput args or remove the parsed options from sys.argv, however I don’t know a elegant way of doing it. Any pointers?

Answer 1

From the documentation:

To specify an alternative list of filenames, pass it as the first argument to input(). A single file name is also allowed.

So you can just pass in the leftover args you get from optparse.