# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Caleb Epstein
# on Tuesday 29 June 2004 11:27 pm:
>> -f, --force, --noforce force overwrite of existing files (default:
>> no)
>
> I assume that for this module to know that "--noforce" is
> viable, you mistakenly omitted the "!" at the end of
> 'f|force!'?
Yes. I was copying into the email while simultaneously revising my code:)
> Documentation that arguments are array-refs ("@") are
> which can be specified multiple times would be a neat feature,
> too.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. That the help message should mark options
as arrays and hashes? I'm not sure that I want that to be so automatic
(maybe just a list of symbols at the end of the line (e.g. "s@" for string
array?))
Well, the help_string() function is operable now and into the subversion repo
at http://ericwilhelm.homeip.net/svn/Getopt-Helpful/trunk/code/Getopt/
I tried to use the Getopt::Long::ParseOptionSpec() function, but ended up with
some naive regex operations instead. If you have svn, you can take a look a
couple of versions back. It wasn't very pretty.
The only magic that currently happens is related to the third argument in the
rows given to new(). When you make a help_string(), you get your option name
in <>'s unless the option had no type (boolean) or you had passed an explicit
'<arg is a file>' kind of string.
my $hopt = Getopt::Helpful->new(
['n|name=s', \$name, '', # <-- here arg string is undef
"name for new part"],
['p|parts=s', \$parts, '<parts dir>', # <-- this one is explicit
"directory containing parts (default $parts)"],
);
print $hopt->help_string;
This prints:
options:
-n, --name <name>
name for new part
-p, --parts <parts dir>
directory containing parts (default parts/)
--Eric
--
"These crispix get soggy so quickly."
-- Tina Connolly
