Getting started

All libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. While there are other argument-handling libraries available, such as optparse and ConfigParser, our scripts will leverage argparse as our de facto command-line handler. While optparse was the library to use in prior versions of Python, argparse has served as the replacement for creating argument handling code. The ConfigParser library parses arguments from a configuration file instead of the command line. This is useful for code that requires a large number of arguments or has a significant number of options. We will not cover ConfigParser in this book, though it is worth exploring if you find your argparse configuration becomes difficult to maintain.