Because of certain special requirements of one of the C# applications I was developing, I had to write my own command-line arguments parser library. With the limited documentation available for GNU getopt (at least I couldn't find much immediately) and with my limited exposure to the open-source world, I couldn't comprehensively evaluate my library against getopt, which appears to be the de-facto command-line parser library available out there. Can someone please tell me how my library compares with GNU getopt?
Following are the features of my library:
Allows the client-application to define its own key-prefix.
Allows the client-application to pass the command-line arguments to the parser. The parser non-interactively parses the command-line arguments and returns a dictionary containing parsed values and flags, which the application can use for further processing.
Distinguishes between keys and flags. Only keys can take in values. Flags are directives that hold special meaning to the client application.
Allows the client-application to configure the parser with the set of valid keys and flags that the application can accept. The parser would use this while parsing to validate the command-line input.
Allows the client-application to tell the parser whether keys can accept multiple values or single value. If the application can accept multiple values, the parser would return a
Dictionary<string, List<string>>containing the various keys and their corresponding values in a list. Otherwise, it would return aDictionary<string,string>.While configuring the parser, the client-application can specify which of the keys are mandatory and which are optional. The parser would check the command-line input for presence of mandatory keys.
The parser allows the client-application to supply the list of valid keys and flags either programmatically or by supplying the name of files containing them.