Python: Arguments

This post is in how do use argparse package.

First you must import the package.

import argparse

Next you setup the argument parser.

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

Then you create a list of arguments. See the link above for more options then the below set.

argument_list = [
    { "name": "<NAME>", "help": "<HELP_TEXT>", "type": "<TYPE>", "required": True}
]

Then we take your argument_list and create arguments and assign them to the parser.

for arg in argument_list:
    parser.add_argument("--{}".format(arg["name"], help=arg["help"], type=arg["type"], required=arg["required"])

Then we parse the args from “sys.argv”. Parsing args this way means that if anything is unknown to your program than your program won’t fail but instead it will set those variables to the unknown variable and continue your application.

args, unknown = parser.parse_known_args()

You could also parse the args from “sys.argv” this way. However that means that all the args passed to sys.argv must be known otherwise it will fail.

args = parser.parse_args()

Then as a final step we set the values with their key to the config.

config = vars(args)