How to reuse positional arguments entered in terminal.

[rcmanu95]

Hello Guys, quick question from a beginner. I am learning about the module argparse and I wanted to know about this code. You see the positional arguments there -a and -b , these are storing values right. Suppose, I type on the terminal -a 42 -b 36, is there are way to extract those variables from the terminal to my program so that I can use those numbers for some functions. For e.g I might want to use the numbers entered 42 and 36 to be used in a function called sum where I add these two numbers. Basically, how do I capture their values entered because a, b are not actual variables that I can use.

import argparse

import os
import sys


if __name__=="__main__":
    # Create the parser
    my_parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='parsing',
                                        description='List the content of a folder',
                                        epilog='Enjoy the program :)')

    # Add the arguments
    my_parser.add_argument('Path',
                           metavar='path',
                           type=str,
                           help='the path to list')
    my_parser.add_argument('-a', action='store', help='This is 1st arg')
    my_parser.add_argument('-b', action='store', help='This is 2nd arg')
    my_parser.add_argument('-l',
                           '--long',
                           action='store_true',
                           help='enable the long listing format')

    # Execute the parse_args() method
    args = my_parser.parse_args()
    print("All parameters have been read")
    input_path = args.Path

    if not os.path.isdir(input_path):
        print('The path specified does not exist')
        sys.exit()

    for line in os.listdir(input_path):
        if args.long: #simplified long listing
            size = os.stat(os.path.join(input_path, line)).st_size
            line = '%10d %s' % (size, line)
        print(line)

[bowlofred]

On line 26, all the parsed arguments are returned into args as a Namespace Object.

Since you didn't override the destination, the -a argument will go into the "a" attribute. So you can get the information as args.a, just like you're getting the path as args.Path