minimist-string

minimist-string is a minimist wrapper that is able to pasrse command line sentences as strings. The problem with minimist is that you need to give the arguments in an array with every argument in separated strings (as in node's process.argv). The following wouldn't work:

console.log(minimist(['foo --bar "Hello!"']));
// { _: [ 'foo --bar "Hello!"' ] } wich is not what we want

The next logical step is doing:

console.log(minimist('foo --bar "Hello!"'.split(' ')));
// { _: [ 'foo' ], bar: '"Hello!"' }

That actually returns what we expect. The problem comes when the user-defined string has spaces:

console.log(minimist('foo --bar "Hello world!"'.split(' ')));
// { _: [ 'foo', 'world!"' ], bar: '"Hello' }

Only "Hello gets to the bar parameter, while the rest of it gets to argv._, wich is a disaster. minimist-string solves this problem:

Usage

npm install --save minimist-string

const parseSentence = require('minimist-string');

console.log(parseSentence('foo --bar "Hello world!"'));
// { _: [ 'foo' ], bar: 'Hello world!' }

It even works with escaped quotes!

console.log(parseSentence('foo --bar "Hello \\"world\\"!"'));
// { _: [ 'foo' ], bar: 'Hello "world"!' }