Looking for a Command Line Argument Parser for .NE

Question

I'm looking for a command line argument parser, such as "Command line parser" from http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/Genghis/ .

Features I'm looking for:

• Auto-generation of usage
• Should able to check required and optional parameters
• Parameters should support IEnumerable with separator support
• Should support flag parameters
• Would be nice to support combining parameters such as "/fx" == "/f /x"
• Would be nice to not force for a space after a parameter such as "/ftest.txt" == "/f test.txt"

P.S : "Command line parser" is quite good, I really like the design of it but there is no documentation, no new updates and I couldn't figure out to do certain stuff such as how to check for required parameters.

Answer 1

Sadly there's no built in support for handling that in a standard manner. Have you looked into PowerShell? I bet there's a class in that shell which does exactly what you want or something similar.

Answer 2

Have a look at ndesk.options.

It is called Mono.Options now.

Answer 3

Edit: as fatcat1111 points out, this feature did not ship with the final version of .net 4.0.

C# 4.0 has a pretty good one. Probably not very helpful yet, but you might want to consider looking at something that will make the jump to the built in one easy when it comes out. Bart De Smet talked about it on his B# blog

Answer 4

A popular and pretty comprehensive C command-line parser is GNU getopt. This has been ported (or cloned) for C#/.Net several times. Some of these include:

• getopt# on freshmeat.net
• C# getopt at PHPGuru
• XGetoptCS on CodeProject
• GetOpt for .NET on CodeProject
• Getopt C#.NET on Codeplex

Take your pick! There are several others, and google can tell you about those,

Answer 5

I suggest NDesk.Options

look here:

Best way to parse command line arguments in C#?

Answer 6

The BizArk library contains a command-line parser.

Basically you just create a class that inherits from CmdLineObject, add properties that you want populated from the command-line, add a CmdLineArgAttribute to the properties, then call Initialize in your program. It supports ClickOnce URL arguments too!

Features (from the site)...

• Automatic initialization: Class properties are automatically set based on the command-line arguments.
• Default properties: Send in a value without specifying the property name.
• Value conversion: Uses the powerful ConvertEx class also included in BizArk to convert values to the proper type.
• Boolean flags. Flags can be specified by simply using the argument (ex, /b for true and /b- for false) or by adding the value true/false, yes/no, etc.
• Argument arrays. Simply add multiple values after the command-line name to set a property that is defined as an array. Ex, /x 1 2 3 will populate x with the array { 1, 2, 3 } (assuming x is defined as an array of integers).
• Command-line aliases: A property can support multiple command-line aliases for it. For example, Help uses the alias ?.
• Partial name recognition. You don’t need to spell out the full name or alias, just spell enough for the parser to disambiguate the property/alias from the others.
• Supports ClickOnce: Can initialize properties even when they are specified as the query string in a URL for ClickOnce deployed applications. The command-line initialization method will detect if it is running as ClickOnce or not so your code doesn’t need to change when using it.
• Automatically creates /? help: This includes nice formatting that takes into account the width of the console.
• Load/Save command-line arguments to a file: This is especially useful if you have multiple large, complex sets of command-line arguments that you want to run multiple times.