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pythonfilefilenamescommand-line-arguments

Automatically open files given as command line arguments in Python

I have a lot of Perl scripts that looks something like the following. What it does is that it will automatically open any file given as a command line argument and in this case print the content of that file. If no file is given it will instead read from standard input.

while ( <> ) {
    print $_;
}

Is there a way to do something similar in Python without having to explicitly open each file?

Solution

  • The fileinput module in Python's standard library is designed exactly for this purpose, and I quote a bit of code from the URL I just gave:

    import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input():
    process(line)

    Use print in lieu of process and you have the exact equivalent of your Perl code.