Question

I have a string with possible command line arguments (using an Read-Eval-Print-Loop program) and I want it to be parsed similar to the command line arguments when passed to Getopt::Long.

To elaborate:

I have a string

$str = '--infile /tmp/infile_location --outfile /tmp/outfile' 

I want it to be parsed by GetOptions so that it is easier for me to add new options.

One workaround I could think of is to split the string on whitespace and replace @ARGV with new array and then call GetOptions. something like …

my @arg_arr = split (/\s/, $input_line);  # This is done so that GetOptions reads these new arguments @ARGV = @arg_arr; print 'ARGV is : @ARGV\n'; GetOptions (             'infile=s'  => \$infile,             'outfile=s' => \$outfile            ); 

Is there any good/better way?

Answer 1

Check out the section parsing options from an arbitrary string in the man page for Getopt::Long, I think it does exactly what you’re looking for.