cpp-optparse This is yet another option parser for C++. It is modelled after the excellent Python optparse API. Although incomplete, anyone familiar to optparse should feel at home: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html Copyright (C) 2010 Johannes Weißl <jargon@molb.org> License: your favourite BSD-style license Design decisions: - elegant and easy usage more important than speed / flexibility - shortness more important than feature completeness * no unicode * no checking for user programming errors Why not use getopt/getopt_long? - not C++ / not completely POSIX - too cumbersome to use, would need lot of additional code Why not use Boost.Program_options? - boost not installed on all target platforms (esp. cluster, HPC, ...) - too big to include just for option handling: 322 *.h (44750 lines) + 7 *.cpp (2078 lines) Why not use tclap/Opag/Options/CmdLine/Anyoption/Argument_helper/...? - no reason, writing one is faster than code inspection :-) - similarity to Python desired for faster learning curve Future work: - nargs > 1? - comments? Example: using optparse::OptionParser; OptionParser parser = OptionParser() .description("just an example"); parser.add_option("-f", "--file") .dest("filename") .help("write report to FILE") .metavar("FILE"); parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet") .action("store_false") .dest("verbose") .set_default("1") .help("don't print status messages to stdout"); optparse::Values options = parser.parse_args(argc, argv); vector<string> args = parser.args(); if (options.get("verbose")) cout << options["filename"] << endl;