How to add a mandatory option to the parser with prefix -i or --input to specify the input file to the script?
The provided value should be placed into the infile variable
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1 Answer
Distilling from the documentation, a minimalistic answer would be
import argparse
#Create the parser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Does some stuff with an input file.')
#add the argument
parser.add_argument('-i', '--input', dest='infile', type=file, required=True,
metavar='INPUT_FILE', help='The input file to the script.')
#parse and assign to the variable
args = parser.parse_args()
infile=args.infile
Be aware that if the specified file does not exist, the parser will throw an IOError. removing the type=file parameter will default to reading a string and will let you handle the file operations on the parameter later on.