perl-Getopt-Tabular

Getopt::Tabular is a Perl 5 module for table-driven argument parsing,
vaguely inspired by John Ousterhout's Tk_ParseArgv. All you really need to
do to use the package is set up a table describing all your command-line
options, and call &GetOptions with three arguments: a reference to your
option table, a reference to '@ARGV' (or something like it), and an
optional third array reference (say, to '@newARGV'). &GetOptions will
process all arguments in '@ARGV', and copy any leftover arguments (i.e.
those that are not options or arguments to some option) to the '@newARGV'
array. (If the '@newARGV' argument is not supplied, 'GetOptions' will
replace '@ARGV' with the stripped-down argument list.) If there are any
invalid options, 'GetOptions' will print an error message and return 0.
Before I tell you all about why Getopt::Tabular is a wonderful thing, let
me explain some of the terminology that will keep popping up here.

argument
any single word appearing on the command-line, i.e. one element of the
'@ARGV' array.

option
an argument that starts with a certain sequence of characters; the
default is "-". (If you like GNU-style options, you can change this to
"--".) In most Getopt::Tabular-based applications, options can come
anywhere on the command line, and their order is unimportant (unless one
option overrides a previous option). Also, Getopt::Tabular will allow any
non-ambiguous abbreviation of options.

option argument
(or value) an argument that immediately follows certain types of
options. For instance, if '-foo' is a scalar-valued integer option, and
'-foo 3' appears on the command line, then '3' will be the argument to
'-foo'.

option type
controls how 'GetOptions' deals with an option and the arguments that
follow it. (Actually, for most option types, the type interacts with the
'num_values' field, which determines whether the option is scalar- or
vector-valued. This will be fully explained in due course.)



          

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License: GPL-2.0+ or Artistic-1.0
URL: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Getopt-Tabular/