How to accept whitespace in string method options

Question

I have an method that takes an string option containing whitespace:

desc 'events', 'List events'
method_option :since, :desc => 'Show events since', :default => "2 years ago"
def events
    # ...
end

but it seems that the parameters are naively split on whitespace so I get this error:

$ example events --since="1 hour ago"
ERROR: "example events" was called with arguments ["hour", "ago"]
Usage: "example events"

If I change the type to array I can get it to accept the full value, but that's not exactly what I'm after.

Any advice would be appreciated.

---

Edit

@mrlew's answer demonstrated that my error wasn't a Thor issue, and it made me to go back and check my assumptions. I'm using the Thor CLI rather than Thor modules, and in my wrapper script I wasn't handling args correctly. I just needed to wrap ${@} in double quotes, as below, and now everything works as expected.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

ruby -Ilib ./exe/example "${@}"

Thanks @mrlew :)

Answer 1

I don't know thor gem very well, but this code just might work:

class Example < Thor
    desc 'events', 'List events'
    method_option :since, desc: 'Show events since', default: "2 years ago"
    def events
        puts "since: " + options[:since]
    end
end

Some points:

• desc first parameter must be the name of the method called. In your example, it was different.
• you must use options[:key] to retrieve the argument value.

It works here:

$thor example:events
since: 2 years ago

$ thor example:events --since="long time ago"
since: long time ago