Hi all,
I'm pleased to announce the release of getopt-1.3.0. This release includes a Getopt::Long class.
== What is it?
A sane replacement for command line parsing libraries like getoptlong and optparse.
== How does it work
It's similar to the old Getoptlong class, but it's less verbose, more flexible and (*shock*) it returns a hash.
== Synopsis
require "getopt/long"
include Getopt
opts = Long.getopts(
[ "--name", "-n", REQUIRED ],
[ "--age", "-a", OPTIONAL ],
[ "--more", "-m", INCREMENT],
[ "--verbose", "-v", BOOLEAN]
)
# User passes "--name dan --age=35 -m -m -v"
opts == {
"n" => "dan",
"name" => "dan",
"a" => "35",
"age" => "35",
"m" => 2,
"more" => 2,
"v" => true,
"verbose" => true
}
The dups are there to give you maximum flexibility with regards to how you access your option, e.g. you could do:
if opts["v"] # or
if opts["verbose"]
This, along with the removal of "--" and "-", saves on the carpal.
You'll also notice that you can use the "=" syntax for long options, e.g. "--age=35", if you happen to prefer that style.
See the README file for more details.
== Where can I get it?
You should be able to do "gem install getopt" very soon. Or, you can get the tarball via the RAA.
== Why I wrote this
My main gripe with the getoptlong library currently in the standard library is that it doesn't return a hash, yet gives you partial hash behavior. This was both confusing and annoying, since the first thing I (and everyone else)
does is collect the results into a hash for later processing. Just yesterday Ara Howard did this in ruby-talk:163940. It's also too verbose.
My main gripe with the optparse library (also in the standard library) is
that it treats command line processing like event processing. It's too
complex, when 90% of the time all you want to do is slurp the command line options into a hash.
So, I did something utterly novel with this library. I collected the command line options ... (wait for it) ... into a hash! Then I give that hash to you, aliases and all. I did get some ideas from Perl's Getopt::Long library, but this is in no way a port of that module (which supports POSIX parsing, GNU parsing, more option types, etc). My goal was to provide the functionality that I felt would cover the vast majority of common cases, yet still provide a little extra spice with switch types (REQUIRED, OPTIONAL, etc).
== Future Plans
There are a few extra things I plan to add but I do not plan on this library ever becoming as feature rich as, say, Perl's Getopt::Long module. I'm more interested in just making it usable and easy.
Enjoy!
Dan
