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So I'm trying to get my program to do take the command line arguments and use it in my script. I read argparse and the optparse documentation and I'm still lost. What I'm trying to do is have my code execute this on the command line:

./program <-p port> <-s> [required1] [required2]

The -p is optional, and I want to make the port a variable in my script, like so:

server_address = ('some server name', **port**)

I thought that that's what store and dest would do... as in store would take the port argument and dest would be the variable name and I could call it like program.port. It doesn't work this way, however, and I can't find or decipher explanations for what exactly store and dest do.

I'm new to Python, so this might not be a well-formed question.

D. Yu
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  • I'm gonna assume you meant `parser.add_argument('-p', '--port', type=int)`, which I just tried, and didn't work. – D. Yu Sep 18 '19 at 04:27

1 Answers1

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so, following the documentation:

  1. You create a parser 
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Some helpful text about what your function does')
  1. You add arguments, optional ones have '-'s before hand, see below
parser.add_argument('-p', '--port', type=int, default=0, help='port')
parser.add_argument('-s', help='I don\'t know what this is')
parser.add_argument('required_1')  # Note the lack of dashes
parser.add_argument('required_2')
  1. You need to parse the arguments with a function call
args = parser.parse_args()
  1. This creates a namespace object which you can then access your variables from, see below
port = args.port
or
port = vars(args)['port']
req1 = args.required_1
req2 = args.required_2
etc...

For more information on namespace objects, checkout this question

Hopefully that helps.

iggy12345
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  • Thanks so much!!! Out of all of the resources I tried to look at, this is the most helpful and clear one I've seen. I did more digging and found this, as well, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18335687/python-using-argparse-argumentparser-method, but I appreciate your answer a lot. – D. Yu Sep 18 '19 at 05:36
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    You're welcome, if this answers your question, please remember to accept the answer! :) – iggy12345 Sep 18 '19 at 05:38