Re: [boost] arguments parsing, wildcard matcher

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-11-16 08:19:31

> Just a couple of classes I wrote that I wondered if anyone thought
> any place in boost:
>
> arguments : simple command-line arguments and options parser:
>
> class arguments
> {
> public:
> 	arguments(int argc, char* argv[]);
>
> 	bool has_option(const char* name) const;
> 	bool get_option(const char* name, bool& value) const;

> Any interest? Already proposed? Wasting my time?

Actually, I'm already working on library with the same goals but more 
elaborated. Moreover, it's almost finished. I planned to announce it later, 
but have to do it now. My design goals were:
 - It should be resonable to use the library to parse as little as 2 command 
line options.
- It must be extandable to privide any resonable handling
- since command line is just a way to affect the program behaviour, other 
ways to accomplish that must be provided, most notable is configuration file
- library should provide a way to store information from command line and 
config file in a way allowing easy retrieval and using to change configurable 
parameters of the program.

The docs are available at:
http://chronos.cs.msu.su/~ghost/projects/config_db/doc/index.html

Let me know what you think.

Concerning your proposal, I can mark two points, apart from it's been a 
subset of mine:
1. It uses get_options(const char* name, type& value) methods, which are not 
extendable (and the similar thing is used in KConfig class in KDE....) What I 
propose is
variables_map vm .....
int i = vm["magic"].as<int>()
FontName fn = vm["font"].as<FontName>()
2. You propose wildcard expansions. This is good. But it is easy to add it to 
any existing command line parsing library.

- Volodya