stlsoft / CLASP

Command-line Argument Sorting & Parsing (C/C++)

CLASP

CLASP - Command-Line Argument Sorting and Parsing - is a small, simple C-language library for parsing command-line arguments, along with a C++ header-only API.

The features of the library are:

• arguments are parsed according to the taxonomy:
• flags, which express yes/no (or true/false, or on/off) choices, and begin with one or more hyphens and have no value, e.g. --verbose, -v;
• values, which express an unnamed value, and do not begin with a hyphen, e.g. ., makefile;
• options, which express a named value, and take one of the forms:
  • a single argument comprising a hyphen-prefixed name =-separated from a value, e.g. --root-dir=~; or
  • a pair of consecutive arguments comprising a hyphen-prefixed name and a value, e.g. -r ~. (This option requires use of aliases;)
• support for the standard UNIX -- argument, which causes all subsequent arguments to be interpreted as values;
• support for the standard UNIX - argument, allowing it to be interpreted as a value, despite beginning with a hyphen;
• a simple protocol whereby flags and options may have aliases, e.g. specifying alias -v for --verbose allows either to be specified on the command-line, while the discriminating code need only check for the --verbose full form;
• combination of flags' single letter forms (or aliases) for succinct, e.g. if -x is an alias for --extract, -l is an alias for --form=list, and -p for ---include-all-patterns, and the command line contains the composite argument -xpl, this is equivalent to --extract ---include-all-patterns --form=list;
• wildcards are expanded on Windows (since its command-interpreter does not do wildcard expansion);
• library functions that automatically provide usage and version functionality, including flag/option, aliases, help string, and valid values, facilitating implenentation of standard --help and --version flags;
• an overarching principal of the design is that command-line processing must be separable from the rest of the program logic, hence:
• the specification of the aliases is done declaratively, in an array of alias definitions;
• there is a rich set of functions for discovering flags, options, and values, and eliciting their values in different data types
• apart from memory allocation (of which there is only one), the library is no-fail, so can never be a source of program failure, allowing it to form a reliable part of C/C++ CLI program frameworks;
• the core (C) library has no non-standard dependencies on UNIX; on Windows it depends on the recls library;
• the C++ API depends on the STLSoft library;

The design of the library is discussed in detail in the article An Introduction to CLASP, part 1: C, Matthew Wilson, CVu, January 2012. (For those of you not subscribers to the ACCU's CVu journal, this article will be made available on the Synesis Software website before end of September.)