XML File as Command-Line Argument and Parse in Python

I would forgo getopt in favor of argparse, which has a very good tutorial here. argparse shows nicer errors with less work. I think getopt is used mainly for compatibility with the C API Both modules, however, support fewer arguments. In your particular case, you will probably want to do something like the following

import argparse

def parse_args():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(usage)
    help = "The file to operate on"
    parser.add_argument("infile", type=argparse.FileType('r'), help=help)
    args = parser.parse_args()
    return args.infile

Depending on your needs, lxml can be very useful/powerful. I've personally used BeautifulSoup (for some not-so-complicated XML stuff). The recommended module in the Standard Library is ElementTree which has a nice API and can do a lot of XML things.

edit: getopt is not deprecated as I incorrectly stated before

A single command-line argument is a simple case, no need for getopt or other parsing modules. Try using the last argument as a file name for use in any XML library.

For pythonic XML handling, use ElementTree .

import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print 'args:', sys.argv
    print 'last arg:', sys.argv[-1]
    if len(sys.argv) <= 1:
        sys.exit()
    tree = ET.parse(sys.argv[-1])
    root = tree.getroot()
    for child in root:
        print child.tag, child.text

(Add file existence checks and error handling after basics are understood).