Parsing the Command Line

18 Jan
Posted on Author William Speirs 1

INTRODUCTION

This blog post will discuss a common and simple problem of parsing the command line. To be honest, Java isn’t usually used to write programs run from the command line simply because you have to wrap the call to the JVM in a shell script to make it user friendly. However, there are times we find ourselves needing to parse the command line in Java.

THE SIMPLE APPROACH

The simple approach is to go-it-alone and simply use the array of strings passed to your main method by the JVM. While this method is very attractive, it is not the SOP for parsing the command line. Why? Because you have to do a lot of work that is already done for you in a library. You need to ensure the order of the strings found in the array: did –host come before www.sop4j.com? You need to check for multiple values: did they pass -p or –port? After more than a single command line argument, this becomes cumbersome. Save yourself time and ensure it works on the first try by using the SOP: commons-cli.

USING COMMONS-CLI

Commons-cli will provide you with everything you need to create simple or complex command line argument options, and then easily parse them. Options are configured in a few different ways.

The above snipit shows options being created using both the addOption method — by passing the various arguments — and using the OptionBuilder class to construct the options. The options are created with the following properties/attributes:

  • opt – long & short versions, no argument, and a description
  • help – long & short versions, no argument, and a description
  • D – short version only, Java style properties (key=value), using = as the separator, with a description
  • file – long version only, with argument, and description

Parsing a command line with these options is extremely simple: create a parser object and call the parse method on the String[] passed to the main method of the program. The SOP for parsers is the GnuParser, it will provide all of the features you’d expect.

The next step is checking for the arguments. This is done by simply calling the hasOption method on the CommandLine object returned from the parse call. If the option provides an argument, then you can get the value of the argument and check to see if it is null or not.

That is it! You now have 95% of all command line parsing you’ll ever need covered with this simple library and a few lines of code. There are more complex things you can do with commons-cli and you can see examples in the full source. If you have questions please ask in the comments. If you have bug fixes or improvements, please fork and make a pull request.

Thanks for reading…

One Reply to “Parsing the Command Line”

  1. Hi All, I have tried something similar but with a command line that is something like:

    -command="command1 command2 command3"

    but getOptionValue returns only command1 and not the whole string command1 command2 command3

    I am missing something?

    thanks

    Reply

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