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The final string that this expression evaluates to is stored in the address variable. You don’t want the program name in this string, so instead of sys.argv, you should pass sys.argv to chop off the first element of the array. Since sys.argv is a list of strings, you can pass it to the join() method, which returns a single string value. If this list has more than just the filename in it, then len(sys.argv) evaluates to an integer greater than 1, meaning that command line arguments have indeed been provided.Ĭommand line arguments are usually separated by spaces, but in this case, you want to interpret all of the arguments as a single string. The sys.argv variable stores a list of the program’s filename and command line arguments. # mapIt.py - Launches a map in the browser using an address from theĪfter the program’s #! shebang line, you need to import the webbrowser module for launching the browser and import the sys module for reading the potential command line arguments. Step 2: Handle the Command Line Arguments So your program can be set to open a web browser to ' your_address_string' (where your_address_string is the address you want to map). But if you try just going to, you’ll find that it still brings up the correct page. Websites often add extra data to URLs to help track visitors or customize sites. When you load in the browser and search for an address, the URL in the address bar looks something like this: address is in the URL, but there’s a lot of additional text there as well. If there are no command line arguments, then the program will know to use the contents of the clipboard.įirst you need to figure out what URL to use for a given street address. the script will use the command line arguments instead of the clipboard. Based on the instructions in Appendix B, set up mapIt.py so that when you run it from the command line, like so.Ĭ:\> mapit 870 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110