Passing integer lists to python

Question

I want to pass 2 lists of integers as input to a python program.

For e.g, (from command line)

python test.py --a 1 2 3 4 5 -b 1 2  

Answer 1

You can pass them as strings than convert to lists. You can use argparse or optparse.

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--l1', type=str)
parser.add_argument('--l2', type=str)
args = parser.parse_args()
l1_list = args.l1.split(',') # ['1','2','3','4']

Example: python prog.py --l1=1,2,3,4

Also,as a line you can pass something like this 1-50 and then split on '-' and construct range. Something like this:

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--l1', type=str, help="two numbers separated by a hyphen")
parser.add_argument('--l2', type=str)
args = parser.parse_args()
l1_list_range = xrange(*args.l1.split('-')) # xrange(1,50)
for i in l1_list_range:
    print i

Example: python prog.py --l1=1-50

Logic I think you can write yourself. :)