Question

I would like to parse arguments passed from the command line with the prefix option as such :

python myApp.y -f file.xml

I am using python 2.6.6 so I cannot use argparse.

And I would like to make it a bit more generic and scalable than

arg1 = sys.argv[1]
arg2 = sys.argv[2]

And then use ifs to check the values and whether they have been provided.

Answer 1

You could use optparse, but argparse is available and can easily be installed on python 2.6.

Here’s how you’d do it with argparse:

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-f','--filename',action='store',help='file!')
namespace = parser.parse_args()
print namespace.filename

---

Or with optparse:

from optparse import OptionParser
parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-f", "--filename", dest="filename",help="file!")
options, args = parser.parse_args()
print options.filename