Question

Possible Duplicate:
Command Line Arguments In Python

I am using Python 3.2. What I would like to do is basically a program that exports text into a .txt file, like this:

[program name] "Hello World" /home/marcappuccino/Documents/Hello.txt

I am a newbie and I dont know how to take whtever’s in between the two “”s and place that into a variable. Is it in sys.argv?
Any help is appreciated! Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, it is sys.argv, which holds the command line arguments. You would want something like:

string_to_insert = sys.argv[1]
file_to_put_string_in = sys.argv[2]

This would assign “Hello World” to string_to_insert and /home/marcappuccino/Documents/Hello.txt to file_to_put_string_in.

Let’s say you have a script named “dostuff.py” and you invoke it like this:

dostuff.py "Hello World 1" "Hello World 2" hello world three 

What you will end up with is:

sys.argv[0] = dostuff.py (might be a full path, depending on the OS)
sys.argv[1] = Hello World 1
sys.argv[2] = Hello World 2 
sys.argv[3] = hello 
sys.argv[4] = world 
sys.argv[5] = three 

Arguments in quotes are considered a single argument.