Can you make a python script behave differently when imported than when run directly?

Posted by futuraprime on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by futuraprime
Published on 2012-04-08T17:27:23Z Indexed on 2012/04/08 17:28 UTC
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I often have to write data parsing scripts, and I'd like to be able to run them in two different ways: as a module and as a standalone script. So, for example:

def parseData(filename):
    # data parsing code here
    return data

def HypotheticalCommandLineOnlyHappyMagicFunction():
    print json.dumps(parseData(sys.argv[1]), indent=4)

the idea here being that in another python script I can call import dataparser and have access to dataParser.parseData in my script, or on the command line I can just run python dataparser.py and it would run my HypotheticalCommandLineOnlyHappyMagicFunction and shunt the data as json to stdout. Is there a way to do this in python?

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