OpenEuphoria

Re: Command line help options

• Posted by jeremy (admin) Nov 29, 2010
• 1310 views

Um, the user can easily over ride -h and --help. The user has complete control if they want to:

1. Over ride and use --get-help, -u or whatever to display help
2. Provide no default help options at all

It's always been this way. There was a bug that I did fix which prevented the no help at all from being recognized, but it was there from the get go. As for hard coding, I'll stick to the idea that -h and --help should be hard coded as that is a logical default that the vast majority of applications will use w/o any issue. If they localize their application, then they can override that the values with their localized values. Euphoria fully supports this.

I gave an example before about how to do this, here is another:

sequence opts = { 
  { "h", "--human-readable", "Display sizes in a human readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G)", { NO_PARAMETER } } 
} 

The above will cause the -h or --human-readable to flip a boolean value to YES, via the long name "human-readable". When looking at the help message from the application with this help sequence it will contain 3 entries, -h/--human-readable, --help and -?.

If you do not like either of those, you have two choices, give your own parameters for help:

sequence opts = { 
  { "h", "--human-readable", "Display sizes in a human readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G)", { NO_PARAMETER } }, 
  { "s", 0, "Admit you are (s)tuck and want help", { HELP } } 
} 

In which case there will be two options presented, -h/--human-readable and -s. If you give -s on the command line, cmd_parse will give the help message as the current -h/--help does. Or, you can specify you don't want cmd_parse() to handle any help options, you may want to do something totally on your own:

sequence opts = { 
  { "h", "--human-readable", "Display sizes in a human readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G)", { NO_PARAMETER } } 
} 
map optvals = cmd_parse(ops, { NO_HELP }) 

Does that cover what you wish to do, minus the removal of the brackets for now?

Jeremy