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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLI-219?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13043148#comment-13043148
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Emmanuel Bourg edited comment on CLI-219 at 6/3/11 12:26 AM:
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Thank you for the patch Gilles. Looking at your command line example I'm not
convinced it's a good idea. If you were to allow several files arguments for an
option I think the syntax you proposed would cause several problems:
{code}-b "file1 file2 file3" arg1 arg2{code}
# people will most likely forget to put the quotes
# what if the file names also contain a space ?
# declaring the option with one argument and getting several values is somewhat
contradictory
I would rather recommend the following syntax:
{code}-b file1 -b file2 -b file3 arg1 arg2{code}
with:
{code}OptionBuilder.hasArg().create("b"){code}
or this one using a non space separator:
{code}-b file1;file2;file3 arg1 arg2{code}
with
{code}OptionBuilder.withValueSeparator(File.pathSeparatorChar).hasArgs().create("b"){code}
but if the number of arguments isn't fixed this will aggregate the remaining
arguments arg1 and arg2. So it's safer to specify the option with a single
argument and then split the value manually.
As for using a regexp instead of a simple char for splitting the values that
seems a bit overkill. What use case would it serve?
was (Author: ebourg):
Thank you for the patch Gilles. Looking at your command line example I'm
not convinced it's a good idea. If you were to allow several files arguments
for an option I think the syntax you proposed would cause several problems:
{code}-b "file1 file2 file3" arg1 arg2{code}
- people will most likely forget to put the quotes
- what if the file names also contain a space ?
I would rather recommend the following syntax:
{code}-b file1 -b file2 -b file3 arg1 arg2{code}
or this one using a non space separator:
{code}-b file1;file2;file3 arg1 arg2{code}
For the latter you can either declare the option with a value separator, or
split the value manually.
> Allow to specify options with a single argument that will be split into
> multiple arguments
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CLI-219
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLI-219
> Project: Commons CLI
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: CLI-1.x
> Affects Versions: 1.2
> Reporter: Gilles
> Labels: features
> Fix For: 1.3
>
> Attachments: svn_diff.txt
>
>
> I've explained the issue in that thread:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06483.html
> As hinted there, a solution might be to allow that the (single) argument of
> an "Option" (cf. "hasArg()") be split according to a user-defined regexp
> pattern. If given a split pattern, the code would convert a single-arg
> "Option" into a multiple-args one (where the arguments are the result of
> splitting the single-arg string with the pattern).
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