How do you read from stdin?

Question

I\'m trying to do some of the code golf challenges, but they all require the input to be taken from stdin. How do I get that in Python?

Answer 1

There's a few ways to do it.

• sys.stdin is a file-like object on which you can call functions read or readlines if you want to read everything or you want to read everything and split it by newline automatically. (You need to import sys for this to work.)

• If you want to prompt the user for input, you can use raw_input in Python 2.X, and just input in Python 3.

• If you actually just want to read command-line options, you can access them via the sys.argv list.

You will probably find this Wikibook article on I/O in Python to be a useful reference as well.