Snippet/lib that handles command line arguments parsing/validation

Question

I have to write some command line utility that should be able to take bunch of arguments of different types and with dependences between them.

I am lazy enough to reinvent the wheel and assume that there is some already made snippets/mini libs that can handle this type of task.

It would be great to have api where I could describe validation rules, defaults, etc, then feed the raw argc/argv to it and get map of parsed values.

What I need:

• defaults for keys/args
• validation of keys/args (some keys should be ints in some range, some keys can take one of predefined string values)
• dependency between keys/args (if key --foo set - user should also provide value for --bar key)

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the library of Boost program_options:

The documentation with examples is here:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/doc/html/program_options/tutorial.html