The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

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Monday, March 04, 2013

Ideas in parsing the command line

For any non-trivial script, even for personal consumption, it's necessary to supply usage text. The novelty of Lapp is that it starts from that point and defines a loose format for usage strings which can specify the names and types of the parameters.

An example will make this clearer:

	-- scale.lua
	  require 'lapp'
	  local args = lapp [[
	  Does some calculations
	    -o,--offset (default 0.0)  Offset to add to scaled number
	    -s,--scale  (number)  Scaling factor
	     <number> (number )  Number to be scaled
	  ]]

	  print(args.offset + args.scale * args.number)

lua-users wiki: Lapp Framework

The thought of parsing the usage text for parsing the command line never occured to me, and I think it's brilliant.

Now, when I want to modify the command line of a program I wrote (and this is mostly in C, by the way), there are four locations I have to edit:

  1. An enumeration specifying the “short” form of the command line option
  2. A structure describing both the short and the long forms of a command line option
  3. A switch statement that processes the command line options from getopt_long()
  4. The text printed out describing the command line options

This method though, there's only one area I would have to edit.

Now granted, this is only for Lua, but I can't see why something similar for other languages can't be done.

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