What I want to do is very simple but I can't figure out a good and not too complex solution for this. Basically I want to define some global variables that will be used for example as a folder name
global folder = "C:\\TEMP\\" + foldername
And what I want is to set the foldername value as input when running the script, something like:
python myscript.py --folder somebeautifulfoldername
so when running my script, the folder will become C:\TEMP\somebeautifulfoldername
You can pass arguments to Python script like following:
python test.py arg1 arg2 arg3
And this is what you get
Argument List: ['test.py', 'arg1', 'arg2', 'arg3']
In your case:
python myscript.py somebeautifulfoldername
folder = "C:\\TEMP\\" + sys.argv[1]
You can use the built-in argparse module for this combined with getting the command line arguments from sys.argv:
import argparse
import sys
if __name__ == '__main__':
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = 'My script')
parser.add_argument('--folder', help = "Subfolder of C:\TEMP\ to manipulate")
args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])
folder = "C:\\TEMP\\"+args.folder
print folder
Here I added just a very simple argument with some basic help string, but you can do quite a lot with this like giving a default value, allowing a list of files instead of a single file, specify the type, ... . See the manual for more details and examples.
Usage:
>python myscript.py --folder somebeautifulfoldername
C:\TEMP\somebeautifulfoldername
>python myscript.py --help
usage: tmp.py [-h] [--folder FOLDER]
My script
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--folder FOLDER Subfolder of C:\TEMP\ to manipulate
import sys
folder = "none"
if("--folder" in sys.argv):
folder = sys.argv[sys.argv.index("--folder") + 1]
print folder
If you run it the way you want:
python myscript.py --folder "HELLOFOLDER"
It will give: HELLOFOLDER
There are a number of options to parse command line arguments into a Python script. There's the standard library's optparse and argparse for instance.
A really nice 3rd party tool is docopt, which allows you to write the logic described above very easily by describing the script usage directly as documentation of your script like this:
"""My script
Usage:
myscript.py --folder=<folder>
Options:
-h --help Show this screen.
--version Show version.
--folder=<folder> Choose folder.
"""
from docopt import docopt
if __name__ == '__main__':
arguments = docopt(__doc__, version='myscript 1.0')
folder = "C:\\TEMP\\" + arguments["--folder"]
print(folder)
That said, you may also want to look into tempfile for generating temporary files to make the script more cross-platform. Hard-coding Windows-specific paths is rarely a good idea.
