mustargs

Introduction

mustargs is a minimalistic library designed for parsing command-line arguments in Node.js applications. It serves as a lightweight alternative to more extensive libraries like yargs, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. With mustargs, you can effortlessly convert CLI commands into a structured JavaScript object, making command-line data handling more intuitive and straightforward.

Features

• ESModule Support: mustargs is implemented as an ESModule, ensuring compatibility with modern JavaScript projects.
• Nested Object Parsing: Easily parse command-line arguments into nested objects using dot notation.
• Array Parsing: Arguments separated by commas or spaces are parsed into arrays.
• Type Parsing: Automatically converts numeric values to numbers.

Installation

mustargs is available as an independent package on npm and can be installed in your Node.js project. Since it is exclusively an ESModule, ensure your environment supports ESModule syntax. To install mustargs, run the following command in your project directory:

npm install mustargs

Usage

To use mustargs, import it into your Node.js project using ESModule syntax:

import mustargs from 'mustargs';

const args = mustargs(process.argv.slice(2));

Simulation

This script simulates command-line input and uses mustargs to parse the arguments into a JavaScript object.

const simulatedInput = [
    'node', 'example.js', '-i', 'images', '--api', 'resize.width=512', 'resize.height=256', 'sizes=256,512', '--format', 'jpeg', 'png'
];

const parsedArgs = mustargs(simulatedInput.slice(2));

const simulatedOutput = {
  i: "images",
  api: {
    resize: {
        width: 512,
        height: 256,
    },
    sizes: [256, 512]
  },
  format: ["jpeg", "png"]
}

Important: Setting type to module in package.json

When using mustargs in your project, it's crucial to ensure that your Node.js environment recognizes ESModule syntax. For this, you need to add the following line to your project's package.json:

{
    "type": "module",
}

Contributing

Contributions to mustargs are welcome. This library is part of the toolx library.

License

mustargs is licensed under the MIT License.