Question

What would be the best way to check if a variable was passed along for the script:

try:
    sys.argv[1]
except NameError:
    startingpoint = 'blah'
else:
    startingpoint = sys.argv[1]

Answer 1

In the end, the difference between try, except and testing len(sys.argv) isn’t all that significant. They’re both a bit hackish compared to argparse.

This occurs to me, though — as a sort of low-budget argparse:

arg_names = ['command', 'x', 'y', 'operation', 'option']
args = dict(zip(arg_names, sys.argv))

You could even use it to generate a namedtuple with values that default to None — all in four lines!

Arg_list = collections.namedtuple('Arg_list', arg_names)
args = Arg_list(*(args.get(arg, None) for arg in arg_names))

In case you’re not familiar with namedtuple, it’s just a tuple that acts like an object, allowing you to access its values using tup.attribute syntax instead of tup[0] syntax.

So the first line creates a new namedtuple type with values for each of the values in arg_names. The second line passes the values from the args dictionary, using get to return a default value when the given argument name doesn’t have an associated value in the dictionary.