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mpeterv / argparse

Feature-rich command line parser for Lua
MIT License
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Question: How to show all comands flags, arguments and options help once? #6

Open xspager opened 8 years ago

xspager commented 8 years ago

I want to show a full help with all options, flags... Is this supported, if not is there a recommended way to do that?

Really nice lib btw :)

mpeterv commented 8 years ago

You mean you want script.lua -h to show not only top-level arguments, options and commands, but also arguments and options specific to these commands? That's currently not supported as this approach doesn't work well once there are a lot of command-specific options. You can get help for each specific command by using script.lua <command> --help.

You can sort of do it by running cmd:help(cmd:get_help()); cmd:description(cmd:get_help().."\n") for each command after it is registered. That sets description of each command to it's full help message. It won't look too good - lines get too long because of double padding:

Usage: sailor [-h] <command> ...

Sailor commands

Options:
   -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.

Commands:
   c, create             Usage: sailor create NAME [PATH]

                         Generates web application in a directory.

                         Arguments:
                            name                  The name of your application.
                            path                  The path to where you wish your app to be created. (default: .)

                         Options:
                            -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.

                         Example:  sailor create 'Hey Arnold' /var/www 
                         This will create your web app under /var/www/hey_arnold.

   t, test               Usage: sailor test [--resty] -- [EXTRA_FLAGS]

                         Will run the tests specified for an application. Must be called from the base dir of the application.

                         Arguments:
                            EXTRA_FLAGS

                         Options:
                            --resty               Run the tests using the resty bootstrap
                            -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.

   e, enable             Usage: sailor enable NAME

                         Will install an extension to Sailor and copy necessary files to your app. Must be called from the base dir of the application.

                         Arguments:
                            name                  The name of the extension to be enabled.

                         Options:
                            -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
xspager commented 8 years ago

Decided to show only the commands available https://github.com/xspager/sailor/commit/4347e44e77d2718f7b114092ba7a76fe37fa9175, what you think?

mpeterv commented 7 years ago

@xspager sorry for not following up on this! I see that sailor has switched to argparse already, so this must have been resolved. The commit you've linked makes sailor show full help on misuse, which is a a valid option. Do you still want to be able to list all options in help, including option specific to each command? If so, we could keep this open as a feature request but I'm not sure how to layout help for options nested in commands.

xspager commented 7 years ago

It might be better to ask @Etiene about that 😕