How to use python argparse with args other than sys.argv?

python argparse argv
ClydeTheGhost picture ClydeTheGhost · Aug 9, 2016 · Viewed 14.7k times · Source

I've been all over the documentation and it seems like there's no way to do it, but:

Is there a way to use argparse with any list of strings, instead of only with sys.argv?

Here's my problem: I have a program which looks something like this:

# This file is program1.py
import argparse

def main(argv):
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    # Do some argument parsing

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(sys.argv)

This works fine when this program is called straight from the command line. However, I have another python script which runs batch versions of this script with different commandline arguments, which I'm using like this:

import program1

arguments = ['arg1', 'arg2', 'arg3']
program1.main(arguments)

I still want to be able to parse the arguments, but argparse automatically defaults to using sys.argv instead of the arguments that I give it. Is there a way to pass in the argument list instead of using sys.argv?

Answer

iCart picture iCart · Aug 9, 2016

You can pass a list of strings to parse_args:

parser.parse_args(['--foo', 'FOO'])

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