How to parse command line arguments in Python? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What's the best way to grab/parse command line arguments passed to a Python script?

I would like to be able to parse command line arguments in my Python 2.6 program.

Ideally, I want to be able to handle these cases:

# Show some help
./myprogram --help

# These are equivalent
./myprogram --block=1
./myprogram -b 1

# This means verbose, and twice as verbose:
./myprogram -v
./myprogram -vv

Answer 1

Check out the argparse module (or optparse for older Python versions).
Note that argparse/optparse are newer, better replacements for getopt, so if you're new to this they're the recommended option. From the getopt docs:

Note The getopt module is a parser for command line options whose API is designed to be familiar to users of the C getopt() function. Users who are unfamiliar with the C getopt() function or who would like to write less code and get better help and error messages should consider using the argparse module instead.

Answer 2

Python has argument processing built in, with the getopt module.

It can handle long and short forms of arguments as well as "naked" and parameterised versions (--help versus --num=7).

For your specific use cases (with a little more), you'd probably be looking at something like:

opts,args = getopt.getopt(argv,"b:vVh",["block=", "verbose", "very-verbose", "help"])

I'm not sure off the top of my head if it allows multi-character single-hyphen variants like -vv. I'd just use -v and -V myself to make my life easier.