How to pass arguments to functions while executing a python script from terminal?

Question

I have a python file named solution.py and I can successfully execute it through the terminal using the following commands:

chmod +x solution.py
python3 solution.py

This works just fine if I have simple print phrases and so on.

What should I do if I have defined a function in solution.py and I want to call it with parameters that I want directly from terminal? How do I pass the arguments to the function call?

Answer 1

You can also use the sys module. Here is an example :

import sys

first_arg = sys.argv[1]
second_arg = sys.argv[2]

def greetings(word1=first_arg, word2=second_arg):
    print("{} {}".format(word1, word2))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    greetings()
    greetings("Bonjour", "monde")

It has the behavior your are looking for :

$ python parse_args.py Hello world
Hello world
Bonjour monde

Answer 2

Python provides more than one way to parse arguments. The best choice is using the argparse module, which has many features you can use.

So you have to parse arguments in your code and try to catch and fetch the arguments inside your code.

You can't just pass arguments through terminal without parsing them from your code.