Parsing arguments using docopt

Docopt is a new generation argument parser. Its very simple and yet powerful augment parser.

Docopt module doesn't available in python library by default.  It can be downloaded from this URL and installed by running command 'python setup.py install'.


Demo Script:

generalInfo.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
#

"""
Usage:
generalInfo.py --name=<provideName> --age=<provideAge> [--sex=<provideSex>]
"""
from docopt import docopt

args = docopt(__doc__)

print args

Output:

$ python generalInfo.py --name raja --age 26 --sex male

{'--age': '24',

 '--name': 'raja',

 '--sex': 'male'}

Notes:

(1) Output of the args is dictionary. Hence you can easily access the data passed as arguments.

print 'Name:', args['--name']

print 'age:', args['--age']

print 'sex:',  args['--sex']

(2) By default all the arguments except the arguments with in  square bracket is mandatory arguments.  Optional arguments can be specified with in square brackets. As in the demo script, --sex argument is an  optional.