One of the most often read postings on this blog is the one about my getopts-enabled shell script template. So I figured, a similar template in Python would also be useful. Like the shell script, it’s quite trivial, but it might still save some time.
The template is an example for a typical unix utility. It connects two aspects: An optparse-based command line parser and iterating over multiple input sources using the fileinput module.
I’ve used command line parsers in several programming languages, but from all of them, I liked Python’s optparse module best (for those who need it, Python’s standard library still provides a classic getopt). The fileinput module is simple but useful. Beyond its main functionality, it supports more advanced features like transparent decompressing (not really Unix-like though) and in-place filtering of files, but I rarely ever use them.
Here’s the template in my online Mercurial repository and here it is for download.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
