I want to pass in some shape or form a dictionary/map/object into my clap app. I can preprocess the dict to turn it into some csv or whatever. My problem is that I cannot find in clap docs which characters are valid for the argument values and how to escape them. Is this unrelated to clap and instead shell specific?
Can I pass something like
myApp --dicty="a=1,b=3,qwe=yxc"
?
Is this unrelated to clap and instead shell specific?
Mostly, yes. clap is going to get whatever arguments the shell has determined and will parse that.
However clap has built-in support for value sets, from the readme:
- Supports multiple values (i.e.
-o <val1> -o <val2>or-o <val1> <val2>)- Supports delimited values (i.e.
-o=val1,val2,val3, can also change the delimiter)
If that's not sufficient, then you'll have to define dicty as a String, you will receive the string a=1,b=3,qwe=yxc (I don't think you'll receive the quotes) then you'll have to parse that yourself, either by hand (regex/split/...) or with something more advanced (e.g. the csv crate though that's likely overkill).
That seems like a somewhat odd option value though.
FWIW structopt (which builds upon clap to provide a more declarative UI, and should be part of Clap 3) doesn't exactly have support for that sort of things but can be coerced into it relatively easily: https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt/blob/master/examples/keyvalue.rs
With some modifications would allow something like
myApp -D a=1 -D b=3 -D que=yxc
or (though see comments in linked snippet for limitations)
myApp -D a=1 b=3 que=yxc
to be collected as a vec![("a", "1"), ("b", "3"), ("que", "yxc")] from which creating a hashmap is trivial.