Argust

A simple command line parser which will accept the vector of program arguments and return a sorted structure which can be used to direct execution of the program.

The command line is divided into three parts -

• Arguments - args which represent either commands or parameters for the program. e.g. cp test.rs test2.rs here "test.rs" and "test2.rs" are the arguements.
• Switches - as the name described. These are switches which can modify the behaviour of program e.g. cp test.rs test2.rs -f here "-f" is a switch.
• Options - like switch options are modifiable parameters for the program and can be used to update default settings/ configurations e.g. cp test.rs test2.rs --buffer-size=2048 here "--buffer-size=2048" updates the default copy buffer to use the value of 2048 instead.

How to use

The usage is very straight forward.

    let args: Vec<String> = env::args().skip(1).collect();
    let command_set: ArgContext = commands::parse_args(args, None);

    // Use the values as required
    if let Some(command) = command_set.commands.first() {
        handle_command(command);
    } else {
        basic_commands::help();
    }

The ArgContext object contains structured information about arguments which were passed. It's defined as-

pub struct ArgContext {
    pub options: HashMap<String, String>,
    pub switches: Vec<String>,
    pub args: Vec<String>,
}

Please note that options doesn't necessarily require to be a key value pair. i.e. cp --version will return a hashmap with key 'version' and value empty.

It's even possible to override the default parse token, i.e. "-" for switched and "--" for options by using the following object and passing it along with parse_args method.

pub struct ParseToken {
    pub option: String,
    pub option_key: String,
    pub switch: String,
}

In the command testApp hello --print=stdin -f. "--" is option, "=" is option_key and "-" is switch.