Features

Static typing

Clip uses a user defined type, struct or class, to infer what options and arguments should be parsed.

The object returned by the Clip parsing method is just an instance of this type, hence you benefit from the type validation at compilation time.

No DSL to learn

There is no new DSL to learn to build applications with Clip.

You want to add a string option? Just add an attribute with a type String.

You want the option to have a default value? Just add a default value to the attribute.

You already know how to do it.

User friendly

Clip allows you to build user friendly applications that respect standard behaviors. Anything you expect from a CLI application should work with Clip too: short and long options, flags, arguments, default values, multiple values, standard help messages, and many more.

Not a CLI application framework

Clip is about parsing CLI-like user input, but is not a framework to build CLI applications.

It means that Clip does not run your application code for you, does not print anything for you, and can read the user input from any array of strings or just any string, not only ARGV.

Not running your application code for you means that you are free to architecture you code as you like. Your command's code can take the parsed options and arguments as a parameter, and others parameters too, because you run it yourself, Clip does not.

Not printing anything for you means that you can send errors and help messages to any medium, being STDOUT, a socket, or anything else.

Reading the user input not only from ARGV means that you can use Clip to build applications that are not CLI applications. You can receive the user input from an HTTP call, an IRC message, a REPL, or whatever you want.

Efficient

Clip uses your type definition to write a parser and build the help message for each command. The parsers and the help messages are built at compilation time, which enabled Clip to have a minimal overhead at runtime.

Tested

The Clip repository contains 136 tests covering all its features, and all the documentation examples can be run "as is".