Re: [Boost-users] [EXTERNAL] Re: [Boost.Program_options] String options parser

On Jun 13, 2017, at 4:23 PM, Michael Powell via Boost-users wrote:

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 5:09 PM, Belcourt, Kenneth via Boost-users wrote:

...

Hi,

We have an executable that uses the program_options library to process command line options like this:

$ ./hilbert.x -h -b [ --hilbert ] arg (=1) enable hilbert matrix -e [ --epsilon ] arg (=0.001) roundoff epsilon -h [ --help ] help message -i [ --input-file ] arg process input file -r [ --rank ] arg rank of matrix to construct -t [ --tolerance ] arg (=1e-13) linear tolerance -v [ --inverse ] arg (=0) enable inverse hilbert matrix -w [ --wordsize ] arg (=8) floating-point word size (bytes)

and it works great. Now we’re trying to automate some testing and we test our executable with an input file that has hundreds of lines like this:

--inverse 1 --tolerance 1e-15 --rank 2 --inverse 1 --tolerance 1e-15 --rank 3 --inverse 1 --tolerance 1e-15 --rank 4

When I've used BPO with input sources, I've used "INI" file format, but I think it may also support other formats like Xml, Json, etc, (?), but I could be wrong about that. Along the lines of this:

inverse=1 tolerance=1e-15 rank=2

If you have several different point of entry, that may work, I'm not sure, or feed your subroutines several input sources, depending on how you've implemented your input handlers:

inverse=1 tolerance=1e-15 rank=2 inverse=1 tolerance=1e-15 rank=3 inverse=1 tolerance=1e-15 rank=4

We’re hoping for a cleaner solution but we could certainly make this work. Thanks for the suggestion!