I am trying to pass the command line argument with white space in it, but sys.argv[1].strip() gives me only first word of the argument
import sys, os
docname = sys.argv[1].strip()
e.g. $ python myscript.py argument with whitespace
If I try to debug - docname gives me output as argument instead of argument with whitespace
I tried to replace the white space with .replace(" ","%20") method but that didn't help
This has nothing to do with Python and everything to do with the shell. The shell has a feature called wordsplitting that makes each word in your command invocation a separate word, or arg. To pass the result to Python as a single word with spaces in it, you must either escape the spaces, or use quotes.
./myscript.py 'argument with whitespace'
./myscript.py argument\ with\ whitespace
In other words, by the time your arguments get to Python, wordsplitting has already been done, the unescaped whitespace has been eliminated and sys.argv is (basically) a list of words.
./myscript.py argument\ with\ whitespaceYou need to use argv[1:] instead of argv[1]:
docname = sys.argv[1:]
To print it as a string:
' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) # Output: argument with whitespace
sys.argv[0] is the name of the script itself, and sys.argv[1:] is a list of all arguments passed to your script.
Output:
>>> python myscript.py argument with whitespace
['argument', 'with', 'whitespace']
strip() is a str method, that's why I am using sys.argv[1:]
sys.argv[0] is the name of the script itself, that's why we use sys.argv[1:] to read the rest of optionsYou can use double quoted string literal in the command line. Like
python myscript.py "argument with whitespace"
Else of:
python myscript.py argument with whitespace
Here you can use backslashes too:
python myscript.py argument\ with\ whitespace\
Try it with argparse:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-f", "--file",
help="specify the file to be used (enclose in double-quotes if necessary)",
type=str)
args = parser.parse_args()
if args.file:
print("The file requested is:", args.file)
The results are:
$ ./ex_filename.py --help
usage: ex_filename.py [-h] [-f FILE]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-f FILE, --file FILE specify the file to be used (enclose in double-quotes
if necessary)
$ ./ex_filename.py -f "~/testfiles/file with whitespace.txt"
The file requested is: ~/testfiles/file with whitespace.txt
$
Note that the -h / --help comes "free".
