Really Cheap Command-Line Option Parsing in Ruby

Question

EDIT: Please, please, please read the two requirements listed at the bottom of this post before replying. People keep posting their new gems and li

Answer 1

I'm going to share my own simple option parser that I've been working on for some time. It's merely 74 lines of code, and it does the basics of what the Git's internal option parser does. I took OptionParser as inspiration, and also Git's.

https://gist.github.com/felipec/6772110

It looks like this:

opts = ParseOpt.new
opts.usage = "git foo"

opts.on("b", "bool", help: "Boolean") do |v|
 $bool = v
end

opts.on("s", "string", help: "String") do |v|
 $str = v
end

opts.on("n", "number", help: "Number") do |v|
 $num = v.to_i
end

opts.parse

Answer 2

Since nobody appeared to mention it, and the title does refer to cheap command-line parsing, why not just let the Ruby interpreter do the work for you? If you pass the -s switch (in your shebang, for example), you get dirt-simple switches for free, assigned to single-letter global variables. Here's your example using that switch:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -s
puts "#$0: Quiet=#$q Interactive=#$i, ARGV=#{ARGV.inspect}"

And here's the output when I save that as ./test and chmod it +x:

$ ./test
./test: Quiet= Interactive=, ARGV=[]
$ ./test -q foo
./test: Quiet=true Interactive=, ARGV=["foo"]
$ ./test -q -i foo bar baz
./test: Quiet=true Interactive=true, ARGV=["foo", "bar", "baz"]
$ ./test -q=very foo
./test: Quiet=very Interactive=, ARGV=["foo"]

See ruby -h for details.

That must be as cheap as it gets. It will raise a NameError if you try a switch like -:, so there's some validation there. Of course, you can't have any switches after a non-switch argument, but if you need something fancy, you really should be using at the minimum OptionParser. In fact, the only thing that annoys me about this technique is that you'll get a warning (if you've enabled them) when accessing an unset global variable, but it's still falsey, so it works just fine for throwaway tools and quick scripts.

One caveat pointed out by FelipeC in the comments in "How to do really cheap command-line option parsing in Ruby", is that your shell might not support the 3-token shebang; you may need to replace /usr/bin/env ruby -w with the actual path to your ruby (like /usr/local/bin/ruby -w), or run it from a wrapper script, or something.

Answer 3

I totally understand why you want to avoid optparse - it can get too much. But there are a few far "lighter" solutions (compared to OptParse) that come as libraries but are simple enough to make a single gem installation worthwhile.

For example, check out this OptiFlag example. Just a few lines for the processing. A slightly truncated example tailored to your case:

require 'optiflag'

module Whatever extend OptiFlagSet
  flag "f"
  and_process!
end 

ARGV.flags.f # => .. whatever ..

There are tons of customized examples too. I recall using another that was even easier, but it has escaped me for now but I will come back and add a comment here if I find it.

Answer 4

I share your distaste for require 'getopts', mainly due to the awesomeness that is OptionParser:

% cat temp.rb                                                            
require 'optparse'
OptionParser.new do |o|
  o.on('-d') { |b| $quiet = b }
  o.on('-i') { |b| $interactive = b }
  o.on('-f FILENAME') { |filename| $filename = filename }
  o.on('-h') { puts o; exit }
  o.parse!
end
p :quiet => $quiet, :interactive => $interactive, :filename => $filename
% ruby temp.rb                                                           
{:interactive=>nil, :filename=>nil, :quiet=>nil}
% ruby temp.rb -h                                                        
Usage: temp [options]
    -d
    -i
    -f FILENAME
    -h
% ruby temp.rb -d                                                        
{:interactive=>nil, :filename=>nil, :quiet=>true}
% ruby temp.rb -i                                                        
{:interactive=>true, :filename=>nil, :quiet=>nil}
% ruby temp.rb -di                                                       
{:interactive=>true, :filename=>nil, :quiet=>true}
% ruby temp.rb -dif apelad                                               
{:interactive=>true, :filename=>"apelad", :quiet=>true}
% ruby temp.rb -f apelad -i                                              
{:interactive=>true, :filename=>"apelad", :quiet=>nil}

Answer 5

If you want a simple command line parser for key/value commands without the use of gems:

But this only works if you always have key/value pairs.

# example
# script.rb -u username -p mypass

# check if there are even set of params given
if ARGV.count.odd? 
    puts 'invalid number of arguments'
    exit 1
end

# holds key/value pair of cl params {key1 => value1, key2 => valye2, ...}
opts = {} 

(ARGV.count/2).times do |i|
    k,v = ARGV.shift(2)
    opts[k] = v # create k/v pair
end

# set defaults if no params are given
opts['-u'] ||= 'root'

# example use of opts
puts "username:#{opts['-u']} password:#{opts['-p']}"

If you don't' need any checking you could just use:

opts = {} 

(ARGV.count/2).times do |i|
    k,v = ARGV.shift(2)
    opts[k] = v # create k/v pair
end

Answer 6

I built micro-optparse to fill this obvious need for a short, but easy to use option-parser. It has a syntax similar to Trollop and is 70 lines short. If you don't need validations and can do without empty lines you can cut it down to 45 lines. I think that's exactly what you were looking for.

Short example:

options = Parser.new do |p|
  p.version = "fancy script version 1.0"
  p.option :verbose, "turn on verbose mode"
  p.option :number_of_chairs, "defines how many chairs are in the classroom", :default => 1
  p.option :room_number, "select room number", :default => 2, :value_in_set => [1,2,3,4]
end.process!

Calling the script with -h or --help will print

Usage: micro-optparse-example [options]
    -v, --[no-]verbose               turn on verbose mode
    -n, --number-of-chairs 1         defines how many chairs are in the classroom
    -r, --room-number 2              select room number
    -h, --help                       Show this message
    -V, --version                    Print version

It checks if input is of same type as the default value, generates short and long accessors, prints descriptive error messages if invalid arguments are given and more.

I compared several option-parser by using each option-parser for the problem I had. You can use these examples and my summary to make an informative decision. Feel free to add more implementations to the list. :)