Question

write a script that takes two optional boolean arguments,”–verbose‚” and ‚”–live”, and two required string arguments, “base”and “pattern”. Please set up the command line processing using argparse.

This is the code I have so far for the question, I know I am getting close but something is not quite right. Any help is much appreciated.Thanks for all the quick useful feedback.

def main():
    import argparse
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='')
    parser.add_argument('base', type=str)
    parser.add_arguemnt('--verbose', action='store_true')
    parser.add_argument('pattern', type=str)
    parser.add_arguemnt('--live', action='store_true')

    args = parser.parse_args()

    print(args.base(args.pattern))

Answer 1

The string arguments are not required by default, so you need to state that. Also the print statement that uses the arguments is incorrect.

#!/usr/bin/python
import argparse

if __name__=="__main__":
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='eg $python myargs.py --base arg1 --pattern arg2 [--verbose] [--live]')
    parser.add_argument('--base', required=True, type=str)
    parser.add_argument('--pattern', required=True, type=str)
    parser.add_argument('--verbose', action='store_true')
    parser.add_argument('--live', action='store_true')

    args = parser.parse_args()

    print "args.base=" + str(args.base)
    print "args.pattern=" + str(args.pattern)
    print "args.verbose=" + str(args.verbose)
    print "args.live=" + str(args.live)

the #!/usr/bin/python at the top enables the script to be called directly, though python must be located there (to confirm, type $which python), and you must set the file to have execute permission ($chmod +x myargs.py)