Question

I some lines of code that read a csv file in a certain format. What I’d like now (and couldn’t figure out a solution for) is that the file name stops being stale and becomes an actual user input when calling the python program. Now I have a static file name in the code, eg:

reader = csv.reader(open("file.csv", "rb"))

I’d like this to become an information provided by the user. Is this done using raw_input or is there a way to do it by having the user writing something in the lines of:

python testfile.py --input:file.csv

Appreciate your help in advance!

Answer 1

For reference the optparse (http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html) version would look something like this.

import optparse

parser = optparse.OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-i","--input",dest="filename")
(options,args) = parser.parse_args()

thefile = options.filename
reader = csv.reader(thefile,"rb")

Which would let you call either

python script.py -i foo.dat
python script.py --input foo.dat