Modify a python script that runs on terminal with command line input to work in an IDE

Question

I am playing around with a python software-like code that I downloaded. I need to extract some parts of the code and so I am currently tracing it to understand it better. It would make my life much easier to trace the code in an IDE (I use spyder) so that I can put breakpoints and visually inspect the variables. I therefore want to modify the code but I don't know how to proceed.

This is the directory structure of the code. The main directory is "advance" and 2 of its subdirectories are "advance" and "examples". The code was installed using pip and to run the code, one must go to the examples directory, enter a sub-directory which represents a test case, and simply type "advance ." in the terminal (the "." represents pwd).

After some tracing, I found out that doing this calls the file driver.py with address advance/advance/driver.py. The driver.py code has the structure below:

# import stuff here

def main():
    
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Read working directory")
    
    # some stuff here


if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        main()
    except:
        print(traceback.format_exc())
        print("Execution failed")

As you can see, the main function takes an input which is the working directory.

My question now is: How can I modify this so that I can run this code in my IDE? Or better yet, can I write a script that calls the main function in driver.py and give it the path of the directory for the example test case I want to run? If so, how can I do it?

Thanks and apologies if it sounds too simple. I am coming from Matlab and transitioning to python.

Answer 1

I found in this reddit post that spyder offers to pass command line options, when running a script. See the following setting:

Run -> Configure -> Command line options

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Spyder, so that's what I can tell so far. I guess it works similar to PyCharm (which I use). There it is like this: You adapt your run configuration and can set the parameters you want to pass a script. Afterwards, when running that run configuration PyCharm will always pass those particular parameters to the script. This allows to use the IDE's debugger to examine the code. I would bet that Spyder behaves almost the same way. Good luck trying the suggested settings :)