August 3, 2001 tools

Command Line Parsing

Aug 3, 2001

I got tired of not having getopt under Win32 and the best version to port doesn’t handle slashes (as per the Windows standard) or @files for arguments and it requires you to give away the source for every app that uses it, so, inspired by my friend Josh Gray,  I built my own. It supports typed flags and params, @file support and building full usages on the fly.

Plus, the latest version has support for parsing ANSI or Unicode argfiles, as provided by Johan Nilsson. Thanks, Johan! Also, I’ve added a contribution by Paul Westcott to support arguments with restricted values. Thanks, Paul! And, as if that weren’t enough, Adis Delalic contributed a UML diagram to describe how the CLP is built. Wow.

And as if that weren’t enough, Keith Brown ported the command line parser to VS.NET. Thanks, Keith!