perl-Getopt-Tabular

table-driven argument parsing for Perl 5

*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.)