How to pass an entire list as command line argument in Python?

Question

I was trying to pass two lists containing integers as arguments to a python code. But sys.argv[i] gets the parameters as a list of string.

Input would

Answer 1

Command line arguments are always passed as strings. You will need to parse them into your required data type yourself.

>>> input = "[2,3,4,5]"
>>> map(float, input.strip('[]').split(','))
[2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0]
>>> A = map(float, input.strip('[]').split(','))
>>> print(A, type(A))
([2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0], )

There are libraries like argparse and click that let you define your own argument type conversion but argparse treats "[2,3,4]" the same as [ 2 , 3 , 4 ] so I doubt it will be useful.

edit Jan 2019 This answer seems to get a bit of action still so I'll add another option taken directly from the argparse docs.

You can use action=append to allow repeated arguments to be collected into a single list.

>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.add_argument('--foo', action='append')
>>> parser.parse_args('--foo 1 --foo 2'.split())
Namespace(foo=['1', '2'])

In this case you would pass --foo ? once for each list item. Using OPs example: python filename.py --foo 2 --foo 3 --foo 4 --foo 5 would result in foo=[2,3,4,5]