array support

[coolaj86]

If you ever have a rainy day and want to implement an 'array' type such that I could do -a foo -a bar to produce [ "foo", "bar" ] would be awesome.

[therebelrobot]

+1

[deadratfink]

Could it be more intuitive to provide it as follows on cli: -a ["foo","bar"], try to detect the enclosing brackets and JSON.parse the whole token...

Maybe we have to escape the paranthesis.

[lejenome]

you would then have no matches error on Bash/Zsh.

A better solution would be -a arg1,arg2,"long arg"

[deadratfink]

Pls check out this small piece of code (index.js):

#!/usr/bin/env node

'use strict';

var cli = require('cli');
var path = require('path');
var assert = require('assert');

var usage = path.basename(__filename) + ' [OPTIONS]';
var packagePath = __dirname + '/package.json';

var options = {
    a: [ 'a', 'The a', 'string', '[]' ], // of course, there needs to be the native support for Array here later! 
    b: [ 'b', 'The a', 'string', 'b' ]
};

function main(args, options) {
    cli.info(JSON.stringify(options, null, 4));
    options.a = JSON.parse(options.a);
    cli.info(JSON.stringify(options, null, 4));
    assert(Array.isArray(options.a), 'options.a should be array');
}

cli.setUsage(usage);
cli.setApp(packagePath);
cli.parse(options);
cli.main(main);

When I call it like this:

$ ./index.js -a "[\"foo bar\", {\"foo\": 4}]" -b testb

or even unescaped double quotes:

$ ./index.js -a '["foo bar", {"foo": 4}]' -b testb

it prints:

INFO: UNPARSED: {
    "a": "[\"foo bar\", {\"foo\": 4}]",
    "b": "testb"
}
INFO: ARRAY PARSED: {
    "a": [
        "foo bar",
        {
            "foo": 4
        }
    ],
    "b": "testb"
}

At least, couldn't that be a starting point to implement in cli? Or am I missing something here...?

BTW, I tried that on Zsh.

[YounGoat]

@coolaj86 Good requirement! I have supported such idea in package commandos with MULTIPLE decorator:

const commandos = require('commandos');

const options0 = commandos.parse('test -a foo', { options: [ '-a MULTIPLE' ] });
// options0 := { $: [] }

const options1 = commandos.parse('test -a foo', { options: [ '-a MULTIPLE' ] });
// options1 := { a: [ 'foo' ], $: [] }

const options2 = commandos.parse('test -a foo -b bar', { options: [ '-a MULTIPLE' ] });
// options2 := { a: [ 'foo', 'bar'], $: [] }

The returned options will have or not a property named a. If it has, the property will be an array no matter how many -a <value> set in CLI.