How to parse single string, not string array?

[saaadel]

[just question] Can I use picocli to parse single String, not String array? For example, I have system property that contains all args with spaces, quotes and escaped quotes there. How to parse it?

[remkop]

There is work in progress (see #293) on a tokenizer that splits up a single string into an array of command line arguments, which can then be processed with the CommandLine class as usual.

Can you try using the CommandTokenizer class in #293 and see if it does what you need? (Feedback very welcome.)

[remkop]

Did this answer your question?

[saaadel]

I need two days to check this

[saaadel]

Ok, I've reviewed this PR and ran some tests. It works like ArgumentTokenizer class from DrJava project.

Feedback on your implementation:

• Throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException for empty command line or for command line with spaces only. I think it will be better to return empty array, ArgumentTokenizer works and returns zero length array.
• if we will have multiple spaces between params - we will get this as empty params in the array. Example: "abc xyz" (three spaces between params) -> Returns: [abc, , , xyz]. FYI ArgumentTokenizer skips those repeatable spaces

Conclusion: DrJava's class works better now. Please, fix issues.

PS. anyway, I'm searching for something with escapes in windows notation too (with caret symbol. Example: ^" escaped quote) - in separate method or in the same

[saaadel]

also, why you have two methods with separate implementation? what needs? new CommandTokenizer().parse(str) new CommandTokenizer().parse(scanner)

I mean, why you not replaced parse(str) with short code: parse(new Scanner(cmd)) ?

[saaadel]

Closing the question, temporary imported the ArgumentTokenizer class, but plan to switch your version, when you will publish it in maven with that PR and with fixed issues.

[remkop]

Cool. Thanks for reviewing the CommandTokenizer class!

[ibalashov]

Sorry to revive the old thread, but was the CommandTokenizer finally published? Somehow I can't locate it in the latest Maven release.

[remkop]

No, it wasn’t. Instead, we decided to add two modules, picocli-shell-jline2 and picocli-shell-jline3, and leverage the tokenizer built in to JLine.

[ibalashov]

@remkop Thanks!

However, I don't see any relevance of jline to solve the problem of this thread, i.e. parsing the full text command into the arguments. Do I miss something? 😕 It looks jline is about interactive command input only.

Just to clarify my use case: I want to use picocli to parse a raw user command which comes as a single text line. Does picocli provide this, or should I use some external tool to parse it to the list of arguments?

[remkop]

Picocli does not provide functionality to parse a single String into separate command arguments. See also https://github.com/remkop/picocli/issues/242 for more discussion and background.

The reason I mention JLine is that this library does provide it in its DefaultParser class.