Command-line argument parsing

Different Command-line argument parsing methods are used by different programming languages to parse command-line arguments.

Programming languages

C

Main article: C_syntax § Command-line_arguments

C uses argv to process command-line arguments.^[1]

Java

An example of Java argument parsing would be:

public class Echo {
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        for (String s: args) {
            System.out.println(s);
        }
    }
}

Perl

Perl uses $ARGV.

PHP

PHP uses argc as a count of arguments and argv as an array containing the values of the arguments.^[2][3] To create an array from command-line arguments in the -foo:bar format, the following might be used:

$args = parseArgs( $argv );
echo getArg( $args, 'foo' );

function parseArgs( $args ) {
	foreach( $args as $arg ) {
		$tmp = explode( ':', $arg, 2 );
		if( $arg[0] == "-" ) $args[ substr( $tmp[0], 1 ) ] = $tmp[1];
	}
	return $args;
}

function getArg( $args, $arg ) {
	if( isset( $args[$arg] ) ) {
		return $args[$arg];
	}
	return false;
}

Python

Python uses sys.argv, e.g.:

for arg in sys.argv:
  print arg

References

1. "The C Book — Arguments to main". Publications.gbdirect.co.uk. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
2. "PHP Manual". PHP. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
3. wikibooks:PHP Programming/CLI