How do I access command line arguments?

Python tutorial explains it:

import sys

print(sys.argv)

More specifically, if you run python example.py one two three:

>>> import sys
>>> print(sys.argv)
['example.py', 'one', 'two', 'three']

To get only the command line arguments

(not including the name of the Python file)

import sys

sys.argv[1:]

The [1:] is a slice starting from the second element (index 1) and going to the end of the arguments list. This is because the first element is the name of the Python file, and we want to remove that.

I highly recommend argparse which comes with Python 2.7 and later.

The argparse module reduces boiler plate code and makes your code more robust, because the module handles all standard use cases (including subcommands), generates the help and usage for you, checks and sanitize the user input - all stuff you have to worry about when you are using sys.argv approach. And it is for free (built-in).

Here a small example:

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser("simple_example")
parser.add_argument("counter", help="An integer will be increased by 1 and printed.", type=int)
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.counter + 1)

and the output for python prog.py -h

usage: simple_example [-h] counter

positional arguments:
  counter     counter will be increased by 1 and printed.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

and for python prog.py 1 as you would expect:

2

Python code:

import sys

# main
param_1= sys.argv[1] 
param_2= sys.argv[2] 
param_3= sys.argv[3]  
print 'Params=', param_1, param_2, param_3

Invocation:

$python myfile.py var1 var2 var3

Output:

Params= var1 var2 var3 

You can use sys.argv to get the arguments as a list.

If you need to access individual elements, you can use

sys.argv[i]  

where i is index, 0 will give you the python filename being executed. Any index after that are the arguments passed.