Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

In my current job, I have to look at PHP. Often, I have to run command-line programs written in PHP. All of these programs have a typically PHP approach to command line processing - in other words, it's often a hack, it's done without any great consistency, and you have to do a lot of the hard work yourself. There are at least three command-line processing libraries in PHP, but I longed for Perl's wonderful Getopt::Long module because it improved on them in several important ways:

• You specify all the synonyms for the option in one go, both short and long.
• The result of that command-line option is put in a linked variable, rather than having to fish around for it yourself.
• It can do basic type-checking for options that take integers.
• It can check whether there is an argument needed for that flag and die if it isn't supplied.
• It also handles flags, incrementing options, and putting multiple arguments into an array rather than just catching the last one.
• It gives you back the list of other, non-'option' arguments - for example, a list of files can be interspersed amongst options.

The main thing we want to eliminate by using modules is 'boilerplate', and the current offerings for command-line processing in PHP still require lots of extra code to process their results. So, because the current offerings were insufficient, I decided to write my own. The result is:

Console_GetoptLong

Along the way I added a couple of things. For a start, Console_GetoptLong recognises --option=value arguments, as well as -ovalue where 'o' is a single letter option and doesn't already match a synonym. It also allows combining single-letter options, like tar -tvfz instead of tar -t -v -f -z (and you've specified that it should do that - this is off by default). It gives you several ways of handling something starting with a dash that isn't a defined synonym - warn, die, ignore, or add it to the unprocessed arguments list.

One recent feature which hopefully will also reduce the amount of boilerplate code is what I call 'ordered unflagged' options. These are parameters that aren't signified by an option but by their position in the argument list. We use commands like this every day - mv and cp are examples. By specifying that '_1' is a synonym for an option, Console_GetoptLong will automatically pick the first remaining argument off the processed list and, if that parameter isn't already set, it will make that first argument the value of that parameter. So you can have a command that takes both '-i input_file' and 'input_file' style arguments, in the one parameter definition.

Another way of hopefully reducing the amount of boilerplate is that it can automatically generate your help listing for you. The details are superfluous to this post, but the other convenience here is that your help text and your synonyms for the parameter are all kept in one place, which makes sure that if you add a new option it's fairly obvious how to add help text to it.

As always, I welcome any feedback on this. Patches are even better, of course, but suggestions, bug reports, or critiques are also gladly accepted.