Comments on: C# Argument Parser

By: Ron Klein

Ron Klein — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:31:10 +0000

Thanks for your code. I highly suggest you add a download zip, since copy-pasting doesn’t work (due to special characters like ` (single quote with direction) etc.)

By: Jake Ginnivan

Jake Ginnivan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:31:47 +0000

Ah, that makes sense. Another possible solution would be to use the -url:http://localhost/test/myservice.svc format for the arguments. I have not tested though. I will be posting a follow up post with another argument library I found which is more strongly typed than this one. But this is great for flexible argument parsing.

Will let you know if I sort it out.

By: Todd

Todd — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:42:23 +0000

Actually – amend that. URL formatted inputs are broken with the original RegEx, but not due to the “/”. Rather, it’s due to the “:” in the URL. The following RegEx should solve the problem:

@”^-{1,2}|^/|=”

-Todd

By: Todd

Todd — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:37:18 +0000

Great piece of code. Thanks for sharing.

One thing I stumbled upon, though, is that this code chokes on command line inputs that have URL formatting. For instance, if you want to pass in the address of a web service via the command line (let’s say, http://localhost/test/myservice.svc), the “/” get interpreted as split characters.

The easy work around is to remove the “/” character as a parameter option in the RegEx:

var argumentSplitter = new Regex(@”^-{1,2}|=|:”,…

There are more complex workarounds that could be done to enable “/” parameters -and- URL format input, but each approach has special considerations.

Hope this “nuance” helps others that may run in to this case.

-Todd

By: Andre

Andre — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:05:35 +0000

Jake,

that helps at all and works fine.
For sure to use a space would be fine but it was more importent to make it work.

Thanks for your support.
Cheers

By: Jake Ginnivan

Jake Ginnivan — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:45:51 +0000

Hey Andre,

Thanks for that, looks like there is a error with spaces, ie first example.

The second issue is that IsTrue only checks to see if a flag is declared. So CommandLine.IsTrue(“u”) would return true.
Use if (CommandLine.Exists(“mdb”)) or if (CommandLine.Single(“mdb”) != null)

Hope this helps, will write some tests to get the first example with ‘-arg value’ working. Cheers

By: NL

NL — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:28:01 +0000

…and where are my manners!? Thanks for making the code available Jake!

By: Andre

Andre — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:48:05 +0000

Nice code but I can’t make it work …
Here the args I us:
-u -d -mdb “c:\entries.mdb” -xml “j:\”
In this way the result is:
Arguments CommandLine = new Arguments(args);
if (CommandLine.IsTrue(“mdb”)) mdb = CommandLine.Single(“mdb”); // mdb is true, Single return null

-u -d -mdb=”c:\entries.mdb” -xml=”j:\”
In this way the result is:
Arguments CommandLine = new Arguments(args);
if (CommandLine.IsTrue(“mdb”)) mdb = CommandLine.Single(“mdb”); // mdb is false

Do I missunderstood the usage of?

Thanks,

Andre

By: Jake Ginnivan

Jake Ginnivan — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:19:08 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, will find a new formatting widget and add in the using statements.

Cheers,
Jake

By: NL

NL — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:54:58 +0000

The text formatting widget you use above really mangled the code. The quotes all had to be replaced and a couple < + > as well.

Additionally I had to use the following ‘using’ statements:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions