8

In my program I have a list of pairs - name and size.

I want to build this list from the command line interface using boost::program_options.

It should look something like this:

myProg --value("John",10) --value("Steve",14) --value("Marge",28)

I also need this to be in order - Steve will be after John and before Marge on the list. Is that possible with boost::program_options?

This CLI syntax is just an idea to get the list. If you have a better one, do tell.

n00b programmer
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  • Not really an answer, but according to [this item](http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2009/04/46843.php), yo should be fine – icecrime Dec 23 '10 at 12:33
  • Thanks, but this still doesn't solve the problem of how to parse each value - we want to extract from each value the name and age, without the need to parse the string ourselves – n00b programmer Dec 23 '10 at 12:39
  • `--value("John",10) --value("Steve",14) --value("Marge",28)` is too verbose for the command line, you could use `John 10 Steve 14 "Marge I" 28` (if all these values are optional and there are other required command-line arguments then you could prefix the string with `--values`). The format is concise and is easy to read/write/parse. – jfs Dec 24 '10 at 16:43

2 Answers2

5

You just define your option

("value", value<vector<YourPairType>>()->composing(), "description")

and an appropriate

istream& operator >> (istream& in, YourPairType& pr) { /* ... */ }

that reads a single YourPairType from in in your ("John",10) format. Parsed options will be stored in the order they appear in the command line.

You can achieve greater flexibility if you use custom validators instead of operator >>.

Yakov Galka
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0

A file with each line having one pair of values can be one option. The file could be a plain ascii text file or you can go for xml files too - refer to boost serialization.

yasouser
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