How to read/process command line arguments?

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?

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import sys

print("\n".join(sys.argv))

sys.argv is a list that contains all the arguments passed to the script on the command line. sys.argv[0] is the script name.

Basically,

import sys
print(sys.argv[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.