Question

I’d like to be able to use ruby’s OptionParser to parse sub-commands of the form

COMMAND [GLOBAL FLAGS] [SUB-COMMAND [SUB-COMMAND FLAGS]]

like:

git branch -a
gem list foo

I know I could switch to a different option parser library (like Trollop), but I’m interested in learning how to do this from within OptionParser, since I’d like to learn the library better.

Any tips?

Answer 1

Figured it out. I need to use OptionParser#order!. It will parse all the options from the start of ARGV until it finds a non-option (that isn’t an option argument), removing everything it processes from ARGV, and then it will quit.

So I just need to do something like:

global = OptionParser.new do |opts|
  # ...
end
subcommands = { 
  'foo' => OptionParser.new do |opts|
     # ...
   end,
   # ...
   'baz' => OptionParser.new do |opts|
     # ...
   end
 }

 global.order!
 subcommands[ARGV.shift].order!