accept empty commandline argument value for flag.String in Go lang

Question

I'm creating a CLI tool and in that i want to accept value of string for "-l" flag. if the "-l" flag is passed without argument then use the empty string value. when i run this with empt argument:app.exe -l

I'm running into error: flag needs an argument: -l

Code block: flag.StringVar(&listening, "l", "", "Receive only")

how can i solve this error? bool type work with empty arguments but this case also accept string like: app.exe -l "127.0.0.1"

I'm using "flag" Go package.

Context: I'm creating a tool to send data using the ICMP protocol. In that, the "-l" flag can be used in two ways: if it is present, it acts as a bool value, and it starts listening for all incoming ICMP packets. If we want to filter those packets to receive from a specific IP only, then it will accept a string argument like "-l 192.168.56.27". In that case, it will listen for incoming packets, but it will discard all those with non-matching IPs and only process the ones that match the IP 192.168.56.27.

Note: This problem is now solved. I may have done it in a complicated way, but it is working😊. If you are curious, you can check out the code at GitHub: https://github.com/Aftab700/pingo

Answer 1

I will try my best to explain: I'm defining a custom flag type that implements the flag.Value interface.

type stringFlag struct {
    set   bool
    value string
}

But this will still give an error if "-l" is empty. To deal with that, we will use flag.ContinueOnError in flag.NewFlagSet. and we will check if

err.Error() == "flag needs an argument: -l" then we set the our stringFlag.set = true.

But this will introduce a new issue: if we pass arguments like -l -h then the -h will not be considered a separate flag but a string value to the -l.

To deal with that, I need to modify the os.Args array before passing it to myFlagSet.Parse(Args).

We will check if the -l is present, and if yes then if the next item in the array starts with - character, we will append an empty string, so the -h flag is considered a separate flag.

Code:

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
    "os"
)

var listeningStr stringFlag
var myFlagSet = flag.NewFlagSet("Options", flag.ContinueOnError)

type stringFlag struct {
    set   bool
    value string
}

func (sf *stringFlag) Set(x string) error {
    sf.value = x
    sf.set = true
    return nil
}
func (sf *stringFlag) String() string {
    return sf.value
}

func parseFlags() {
    myFlagSet.Var(&listeningStr, "l", "Listen for incoming ICMP packets\nProvide an IP address to Receive ICMP packets from provided IP address only")

    // -l is string so if there is flag after -l[-l -h] will not consider -h as flag but value to -l
    var Args []string
    var temp = len(os.Args)
    for i, v := range os.Args[1:] {
        Args = append(Args, v)
        if v == "-l" && (i+2) < temp && os.Args[i+2][0] == 45 { // 45 = "-"
            Args = append(Args, "")
        }
    }

    err := myFlagSet.Parse(Args)
    myFlagSet.SetOutput(nil)

    if err != nil {
        if err.Error() == "flag needs an argument: -l" {
            listeningStr.set = true
        } else {
            fmt.Println(err)
            os.Exit(0)
        }
    }
}

func init() {
    parseFlags()
}

For more info checkout the code at GitHub: https://github.com/Aftab700/pingo/blob/main/main.go