Passing arguments with wildcards to a Python scrip

Question

I want to do something like this:

c:\data\> python myscript.py *.csv

and pass all of the .csv files in the directory to my python script (such that sys.argv contains ["file1.csv", "file2.csv"], etc.)

But sys.argv just receives ["*.csv"] indicating that the wildcard was not expanded, so this doesn't work.

I feel like there is a simple way to do this, but can't find it on Google. Any ideas?

Answer 1

In Unix, the shell expands wildcards, so programs get the expanded list of filenames. Windows doesn't do this: the shell passes the wildcards directly to the program, which has to expand them itself.

Vinko is right: the glob module does the job:

import glob, sys

for arg in glob.glob(sys.argv[1]):
    print "Arg:", arg

Answer 2

You can use the glob module, that way you won't depend on the behavior of a particular shell (well, you still depend on the shell not expanding the arguments, but at least you can get this to happen in Unix by escaping the wildcards :-) ).

from glob import glob
filelist = glob('*.csv') #You can pass the sys.argv argument