Clingon

Overview

The clingon gem can be used to easily parse command line input from a user. It can also be configured so that you can validate the inputs you receive. This gem can be used to parse something like this:

--first_name bob --last_name smith --email [email protected] -h

into this:

[
  {
    :name => 'first_name',
    :value => 'bob'
  },{
    :name => 'last_name',
    :value => 'smith'
  },{
    :name => 'email',
    :value => '[email protected]'
  },{
    :name => 'help',
    :value => true
  }
]

Table of Contents

• Clingon
  • Overview
  • Installation
  • Setup
    • Name
    • Short Name
    • Required
    • Empty
    • Type
    • Check
    • Values
  • Use
    • Configuration
    • Parsing
    • Accessing Values
  • Examples

Installation

To install simply use Ruby's gem installer:

gem install clingon

Setup

In order to use the library, you must provide a structure that defines all of the values you expect. This structure is expected to be an array of hashes containing all the options you want. Each hash can contain any of the following options:

Option	Expected Value	Required
name	string	*
short_name	string
required	boolean
empty	boolean
type	string (see below)
check	regex/string
values	array

All keys in each hash must be ruby symbols

values, type, and check are all used to validate that the received values match what you were expecting. The parser will only use one of these settings to validate an input, so you should only define the of those values per input. If more than one of these values are defined, the parser will use them in the following order: values, type, check.

Name

This value will be used as the long name for the command line flag. This value must be defined in your structure for any value that you want to parse. This value should be a string.

Short Name

The value will be used to create a shortened version of the flag. It is an optional value, and it is recommended that it be a single character if possible, but there is no limit on length.

Required

Specifies if the flag must be present. If the flag is not found when parsing, it will throw an error. This value is optional, but if defined, value must be either true or false; defaults to false.

Empty

This can be used if the flag does not require any value and is simply an option marker (i.e -r for recursive or -h for help). This value is optional, but if defined, value must be either true or false; defaults to false.

The empty flag is used for flags that don't need an additional value. It is essentially a boolean value (false if absent true is present). If a value is required it should not have the empty flag. Required values that have and empty flag will simply ignore the empty option.

Type

This option allows you to define what type of value the flag is expecting. If the received value does not match the expected type an error will be thrown. Currently supported types are:

Type	Description
num	Any number, integer or float
int	Any integer
float	A decimal number
bool	true or false

Additionally, when the values are parsed, the user input will be converted to the specified type (int, float, bool). If num is specified, input will be converted to either float or int. When specified in your structure, the type must be specified as a string.

Check

Regular expression that should be used to check the input value against. This can be a string (it will be converted to a regular expression), or a a regular expression (i.e. /^\d+$/). If the received value does not match the specified regex, an error will be thrown.

If using a YAML configuration file, it is recommended that you use single quotes (') when specifing a regular expression. Not doing so may cause the YAML parser to interpret some of the charaters as escape charaters.

Values

An array of values that are acceptable for the flag. All elements of the array should be strings since all inputs from a terminal are received by ruby as strings. If the received value is not a member of the array, an error will be thown.

Use

Configuration

To use the parser, you must first configure the library with your structure and the inputs you wish to parse. There are four values you can configure.

Setting	Description	Value	Required
structure	The structure to be used	Array	*
inputs	The inputs you need to parse	Array	*
delimiter	Delimiter for the flags (defaults to -)	String
strict	Whether parser should accept inputs that look like flags	Bool

Optionally, you can use a YAML configuration file to set some or all of these values (at the minimum, the file should contain the structure). To use this option, pass a relative or absolute path to a YAML file. The parser expects to find the same values as the table above as sybols (i.e :structure, :strict). The only value that cannot be configured through the file are the inputs. To use a file to configure the parser, just do:

Clingon.configure do |c|
  c.conf_file = 'conf_file.yaml'
end

Parsing

After you have configured the parser, you simply need to call the parse method.

Clingon.parse

Accessing Values

The parser has a fetch method that allows you to retrieve one or all of the parsed values. To access the parsed values, simply call the method with the value you want, or leave the arguments empty if you want to retrive all values.

if you query for a specific value, you must use the name that was used in the configuration structure.

# This will return all parsed values as an array of hashes
all_values = Clingon.fetch

# This will return a hash containing the value that was requested, or nil if the
# value was not found
name = Clingon.fetch('name')

Examples

structure.yaml contains a structure in YAML format. example_1.rb makes use of the YAML file configuration file. If you are not interested in using a YAML configuration file, and instead want to define your structure within your script, example_2.rb defines an inline structure.