Groovy CliBuilder with multiple arguments

04 Oct, 2009

Groovy CliBuilder with multiple arguments

Posted by: TheKaptain In: Development

I’ve been writing a lot of Groovy scripts lately and have developed quite a fondness for the CliBuilder along the way.
There’s lots of great examples on the internet, but I could only find one place that demonstrated how to easily consume an unknown number of parameters as a List and that was a copy of the CliBuilderTest I found on Koders. There’s also some explanation for the different behavior inherent in the Apache Commons Cli libraries V1.0 and V1.1 that CliBuilder encapsulates(there is a 1.2 version, but from the documentation it seems CliBuilder may not be fully compatible with it).

Here’s a GroovyTestCase that exercises CliBuilder with multiple arguments.

package org.kar
import org.apache.commons.cli.Option
/**
 * Demonstrates usage of the CliBuilder with multiple arguments to create a List.
 */
class CliBuilderDemoTest
extends GroovyTestCase {
    /**
     * You can specify multiple arguments one at a time.
     */
    void testMultiOption() {
        CliBuilder cli = new CliBuilder()
        cli.with {
            a longOpt: 'arguments', args: 2, required: true, 'Two arguments'
        }
        def args = ['-a', 'arg1', '-a', 'arg2']
        def options = cli.parse(args)

        assert (options)
        assertEquals('First arg is available with the -a option. ', 'arg1', options.a)
        assertEquals('Should be two args, in order, available with the addition of an "s" to the option.',
                ['arg1', 'arg2'], options.as)
    }

    /**
     * You can specify multiple arguments together in a block, with a defined separator(in this case a comma).
     */
    void testMultiOptionWithSeparator() {
        CliBuilder cli = new CliBuilder()
        cli.with {
            a longOpt: 'arguments', args: 2, required: true, valueSeparator: ',' as char,
                    'Two arguments, separated by a comma'
        }
        def args = ['-a', 'arg1,arg2']
        def options = cli.parse(args)

        assert (options)
        assertEquals('First arg is available with the -a option. ', 'arg1', options.a)
        assertEquals('Should be two args, in order.', ['arg1', 'arg2'], options.as)
    }

    /**
     * You can also have any number of arguments by specifying UNLIMITED_VALUES.
     */
    void testUnlimitedArgs() {
        CliBuilder cli = new CliBuilder()
        cli.with {
            a longOpt: 'arguments', args: Option.UNLIMITED_VALUES, required: true, valueSeparator: ',' as char,
                    'Two arguments, separated by a comma'
        }
        def args = ['-a', 'arg1,arg2,arg3']
        def options = cli.parse(args)

        assert (options)
        assertEquals('First arg is available with the -a option. ', 'arg1', options.a)
        assertEquals('Should be a list of args, in order.', ['arg1', 'arg2', 'arg3'], options.as)

        def args2 = ['-a', 'argOnly']
        def options2 = cli.parse(args2)

        assert (options)
        assertEquals('First arg is available with the -a option.', 'argOnly', options2.a)
        assertEquals('Should be a list of args, with a single entry.', ['argOnly'], options2.as)

        def args3 = []
        //this will automagically print the usage string and any validation errors to System.out
        def options3 = cli.parse(args3)
        assertNull(options3)
    }
}

Anyhow, hope that the next guy finds this info useful – it certainly has made my recent work writing Groovy scripts much easier!