help with comparison

[George Sakkis]

On Nov 19, 10:21 pm, tekion <tek... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> Could some one take a look at the below code snipet which keep
> failing:
>
> import optparse
> p = optparse.OptionParser(description="script to do stuff",
> prog="myscript.py", ....)
> p.add_option("-c" "--compress", help="0 is noncompress")
> function1(options.compress)
>
> here's what the what function definition looks like:
> function1(zipfile) :
> if (zipfile == 1):
>    do stuff here with for compress file
> else
>    do stuff here
>
> when I call the script "myscript.py 1", the above test keeps falling
> to the else clause.  I am thinking the object zipfile is not the same
> as "1". Any thoughts as how I should test if the argument being pass
> in and parse by optparse is 1 or "0"?  Thanks.

1 (without quotes) is not the same as "1" (with quotes); the first is
an integer, the second a string. optparse returns strings by default,
so the easiest change would be to make the check 'if zipfile == "1"'.

Even better, since it's a boolean option, pass action="store_true" to
p.add_option(). The test then is reduced to "if zipfile" and the
program is to be called by "myscript.py -c". Read the docs [1] for
more details.

HTH,
George

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html#standard-option-actions