How to read process command line arguments

Question

I am originally a C programmer. I have seen numerous tricks and "hacks" to read many different arguments.

What are some of the ways Python programmers can do this?

Answer 1

The canonical solution in the standard library is argparse (docs):

Here is an example:

from argparse import ArgumentParser

parser = ArgumentParser()

parser.add_argument("-f", "--file", dest="filename", help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")

parser.add_argument("-q", "--quiet", action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=True, help="don't print status messages to stdout")

args = parser.parse_args()

argparse supports (among other things):

• Multiple options in any order.

• Short and long options.

• Default values.

• Generation of a usage help message.