I'm going through Google's Python exercises and I need to be able to do this from the command line:
python babynames.py --summaryfile baby*.html
Where python is the Python shell, babynames.py is the Python program, --summaryfile is an argument to be interpreted by my babynames program, and baby*.html is the list of files matching that expression. However, it doesn't work and I'm not sure if the problem is the Windows command shell or Python. The baby*.html expression is not being expanded out to the full list of files, instead it's being passed strictly as a string. Can multiple files be passed to a Python program in such a way?
Windows' command interpreter does not expand wildcards as UNIX shells do before passing them to the executed program or script.
python.exe -c "import sys; print sys.argv[1:]" *.txt
Result:
['*.txt']
Solution: Use the glob module.
from glob import glob
from sys import argv
for filename in glob(argv[1]):
print filename
Cross-platform:
import glob
if '*' in sys.argv[-1]:
sys.argv[-1:] = glob.glob(sys.argv[-1])
continue...
Using argparse:
import argparse
parser=argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument(dest='wildcard',nargs='+')
print(parser.parse_args().wildcard)
You can do it from UNIX-like shells, right in the from you wrote. In my case, Git Bash did the job - it accepts asterisks as input and process them correctly.
