Passing Python variables via command line?

Question

I'm new to Python (as in, yesterday), so bear with me if I don't know 'the obvious' yet.

There are two ways I could go about this, and either would work fine for me, and I'm not sure if getopt or optparse contains what I want/need (from what I'm reading)? I would like to do something similar to the following:

python this.py --variable VariableName="Value" -v VariableName2="Value2"

OR

python this.py --VariableName "Value"

The main issue I'm facing is that I may need to optionally pass any of the variables in, but not necessarily all and in any particular order (ergo, a raw sys.argv won't work in my case). For some of these variables, I may be passing strings, numbers and/or arrays.

Once the variables are passed in the script, one way or another I'll need to check if they are set / not null and assign default values as necessary.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You definitely want a commandline argument parser. Python ships with a few. Python2.7 has argparse which can be back-ported to earlier versions as necessary and is what I would recommend. There's also optparse. It's not quite as nice as argparse, but it can still do a good bit and is available with older python versions as well as newer ones.

There's also getopt, but that one is hardly worth mentioning in comparison to the others.