Good point. However I need to handle
=head2 foo - .... (no option arg)
versus
=head2 foo (number) - .... (option arg)
or, perhaps
=head2 foo 3 - .... (3 args, passed to main::foo(1, 2, 3)
I neglected to mention that the option foo implies a call to main::foo
when the option is discovered.
The specifier would indeed be completely optional, 'foo - ...' implying
that main::foo takes no args.
My basic question is this: What is the least intrusive way of
indicating that there are a fixed number of args (variable number need
not apply!) such that the user reading the man page generated from the
POD that uses Getopt::Auto is not puzzled by the extraneous word(s) in
the section header.
On 06/29/2009 10:45:31 AM, Jonathan Yu wrote:
> Generally I think the old wisdom is to just assume all input is some
> sort of string, and to perform any validation you need manually or
> using other utilities like Scalar::Util's looks_like_number method
> (which is core anyway).
>
> However, it might be convenient to have a way to verify that input is
> an integer, or floating point number, or what-have you. I'm all for
> adding a feature to do this, as long as it's strictly optional --
> that
> is, a new Getopt::Auto should not break old scripts that expect the
> old behaviour.
>
> One "problem" with simple type validation like this is that you're
> going to be unable to catch certain things using such a simple
> validation method, and it will probably be combined with other things
> anyway.
>
> For example, if you have an --option which can only have the values
> 1,
> 2, 3 -- then you can require the field to be an int, but you're still
> going to have to check that it matches one of the available numbers
> anyway. So in practice I think any moderately robust module will
> implement their own sanity checking.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonathan
>
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Geoffrey Leach<[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > I'd appreciate some advice here.
> >
> > Getopt::Auto was conceived by Simon Cozens. I've recently adopted
> it.
> >
> > The idea with Getopt::Auto is that it scans your POD looking for
> =heads
> > or =item that have the format: 'foo - what this does is bar', the
> > single word followed by a dash being the critical parts, and
> constructs
> > an option-recognition scheme for foo.
> >
> > All this is well and good, but it seems to me that there's a flaw,
> > which is that there's no way to say that foo takes a string, or
> int,
> or
> > ...
> >
> > So that needs to be specified, and while 'foo - ....' is probably
> > acceptable to the POD writer, 'foo int - ...' might be less so,
> taking
> > into account that all of that appears in your POD's paragraph
> headings.
> >
> > Or am I wrong? Perhaps there's a better way?
> >
> > Thanks.
