Getopt::Tabular
                                version 0.2
                               19 June, 1997

Copyright (c) 1995-97 Greg Ward. All rights reserved. This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Getopt::Tabular is a Perl 5 module for table-driven argument parsing, vaguely inspired by John Ousterhout's Tk_ParseArgv. See Tabular.pod for details. It is available from

ftp://ftp.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/users/greg

and should be available through CPAN at

http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/GWARD

Some nice features of Getopt::Tabular are:

• Command-line arguments are carefully type-checked, both by pattern and number---e.g. if an option requires two integers, GetOptions makes sure that exactly two integers follow it!
• The valid command-line arguments are specified in a data structure separate from the call to GetOptions; this makes it easier to have very long lists of options, and to parse options from multiple sources (e.g. the command line, an environment variable, and a configuration file).
• Getopt::Tabular can intelligently generate help text based on your option descriptions.
• The type system is extensible, and if you can define your desired argument type using a single Perl regular expression then it's particularly easy to extend.
• Options can be abbreviated and come in any order.
• A "spoof" mode in which arguments are parsed without side-effects.

To test and install Getopt::Tabular:

perl ./Makefile.PL
make test
make install

That's it! The test suite isn't very complete yet, but it's a start. The documentation is quite extensive; only a few minor features aren't covered. Also, there is a demo program that shows off several of the module's features.

Email problems, questions, bug reports, etc. to greg@bic.mni.mcgill.ca.