How to call module written with argparse in iPython notebook

Question

I am trying to pass BioPython sequences to Ilya Stepanov's implementation of Ukkonen's suffix tree algorithm in iPython's notebook environment. I am stumbling on the argparse component.

I have never had to deal directly with argparse before. How can I use this without rewriting main()?

By the by, this writeup of Ukkonen's algorithm is fantastic.

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem before, but using optparse instead of argparse.

You don't need to change anything in the original script, just assign a new list to sys.argv like so:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from Bio import SeqIO
    path = '/path/to/sequences.txt'
    sequences = [str(record.seq) for record in  SeqIO.parse(path, 'fasta')]
    sys.argv = ['-f'] + sequences
    main()