TypeError: an integer is required python

Question

This is my code:

today = datetime.date.today()

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    arg_month = sys.argv[1]
    arg_year = sys.argv[2]
    print arg_month
    print arg_year
    lastMonth = datetime.date(day=1, month=arg_month, year=arg_year)
    first = lastMonth + datetime.timedelta(month=1)
    lastMonth = lastMonth.strftime("%Y%m")
    curMonth = first.strftime("%Y%m")   
else:
    first = datetime.date(day=1, month=today.month, year=today.year)
    lastMonth = first - datetime.timedelta(days=1)
    lastMonth = lastMonth.strftime("%Y%m")
    curMonth=(time.strftime("%Y%m"))

This is how I run the code: python lelan.py 01 2015

the output is:

01
2015
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "lelan.py", line 22, in <module>
    lastMonth = datetime.date(day=1, month=arg_month, year=arg_year)
TypeError: an integer is required

How to fix this? Thank you.

Answer 1

It's because arguments from sys.argv are strings. You need to cast them to integers:

arg_month = int(sys.argv[1])
arg_year = int(sys.argv[2])

Answer 2

All items gotten from command line arguments are strings; the command line doesn't have any type system, and can't distinguish between strings and anything else. So arg_month and arg_year are strings. You need to cast them to an int explicitly:

int(arg_month)

You may want to consider using the ArgumentParser instead, which can simplify this for you:

parser = ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('month', type=int)
...
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.month)