Re: Argdom.pm

[Hofmator]

in reply to Argdom.pm

Well, another command-line-parsing-module ... but I must say, I prefer Getopt::Long which is a core module and therefore available everywhere. In addition to that, there are plenty of tests for Getopt::Long, it is more flexible and easier to use (eg. no need to define subs that match the arguments by hand). Apart from that, your module has a couple of problems, eg. it doesn't need Exporter, has a inconsistent interface (why can I say my @singles = $a->getSingles; but not my %keyvals = $a->getKeys), ...

To underline my point, I have rewritten the script given in your POD using Getopt::Long. The only difference is that '-4Adam;Barbara' is now written as two arguments -4 and 'Adam;Barbara'. Btw, your script as given doesn't compile, it uses croak without use Carp; - I have replaced that with a simple warn.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Getopt::Long;

my $usage_msg = <<'EOHELP';

greeter is a sample program for Argdom.pm.

--help | -h displays this help message and quits.
-o outfile is the file to which the output is written. Can be many, as
+ in -o f1 -o f2 -o f3. `-' means the STDOUT (default).
-xclaim means the output should be exclamatory.
-4 X;Y;Z means the greeting should be for X, Y, and Z. Default is ``Wo
+rld'' and yourself!.
any other args are the greeting. Default is "Hello"./;

EOHELP

my $xclaim   = 0;
my $usage    = 0;
my $greeting = '';
my $forWhom  = 'World;to you';
my @outs;

GetOptions ("h|help"  => \$usage,
            "xclaim!" => \$xclaim,
            "4=s"     => \$forWhom,
            "o=s"     => \@outs,
) or die $usage_msg;

if ($usage) {
    print $usage_msg;
    exit;
}

$greeting .= $_ foreach @ARGV;
$greeting = 'Hello' unless $greeting;
@outs = qw/-/ unless @outs;

my $output = '';
$output .= "$greeting, $_" . ($xclaim ? '!' : '.') . "\n"
    for (split /;/, $forWhom);
foreach my $outfile (@outs) {
    if ($outfile eq '-') {
        print $output;
    } else {
        open my $outfh, '>', $outfile or warn "Could not open $outfile
+ for writing: $!";
        print $outfh $output;
        close $outfh;
    }
}

[revence27]

I put the subs that select the args, because I didn't want to restrict how args should be formatted. The '-4Me;And;You' thing was to show how extensible the module is. Not everybody is writing (for) POSIX syntax arguments. I do much work on Win32, in which case arg keys are supposed to be more like /something. I hope you get my point. Sure, there are many modules, but this is the only one (I have seen -- not like I work at Google, though) that doesn't think for you. I don't want to replace the programmer. You must choose which args go where, and that is why I put the choosers. GetOpt, you'll notice, is simply for one kind of command-line args. Thanks for the code!