How do I take unlimited sys.argv[] arguments?
Question:
To elaborate, I am interested in learning how to code out in python a sys.argv[] function that allows the user to supply as many arguments as the user wants. I am unsure on if there is a better way to do this or if it can be done at all.
The point to this is to develop a similarity tool between text docs of various size and quantity. the use case in this situation takes as little as argv[1] and as many as argv[unlimited].
Any input, sources, or advice is welcome.
Answers:
sys.argv is just a regular Python list, so you can just ask len(sys.argv) for example, or you can just enumerate the contents directly (using a for ... in loop) as with any other iterable.
Note that sys.argv[0] is the name of the program, so you need to skip the first item. (It then follows that (len(sys.argv) - 1) is the number of arguments supplied by the caller.)
import sys
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
print arg
Example invocation:
$ python test.py a b c
a
b
c
In your case you would replace print arg with whatever processing you wanted to do on the argument.
This will work up to any operating-system-imposed limits. (Some OSes limit the number of arguments you can pass to a program. For example, on Linux you can see these limits with xargs --show-limits.)
To elaborate, I am interested in learning how to code out in python a sys.argv[] function that allows the user to supply as many arguments as the user wants. I am unsure on if there is a better way to do this or if it can be done at all.
The point to this is to develop a similarity tool between text docs of various size and quantity. the use case in this situation takes as little as argv[1] and as many as argv[unlimited].
Any input, sources, or advice is welcome.
sys.argv is just a regular Python list, so you can just ask len(sys.argv) for example, or you can just enumerate the contents directly (using a for ... in loop) as with any other iterable.
Note that sys.argv[0] is the name of the program, so you need to skip the first item. (It then follows that (len(sys.argv) - 1) is the number of arguments supplied by the caller.)
import sys
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
print arg
Example invocation:
$ python test.py a b c
a
b
c
In your case you would replace print arg with whatever processing you wanted to do on the argument.
This will work up to any operating-system-imposed limits. (Some OSes limit the number of arguments you can pass to a program. For example, on Linux you can see these limits with xargs --show-limits.)