[Jargp-general] bug with initial non-control flags?

[Matthew W. <un...@id...>]

Howdy.  I started taking a look at JArgP today, and in the short term it
does everything I need.  But I thought I'd take a look inside anyway...

I *think* I've found a bug.  I'm tired, and I haven't done Java
programming in forever, but it sure looks like a bug.

Line 164 in ArgumentProcessor.java can end it all before a single argument
has been processed, even if there are arguments coming down the pipe:

You get to that line if

        m_currentArg.hasNext()

is false, and

        m_remainingArgs.hasNext()

is true, and

        next.length() > 0 && next.charAt(0) == '-'

is false.

More succinctly, "next.length() > 0" could evaluate to true, but if that
first argument is not a control flag, nothing is processed.  Is the
assumption simply that non-control arguments must come last?  That seems
moderately bogus to me in an argument-processing library where it's
difficult to make assumptions about the command line interface.

I came across this as I delved into the code trying to add long arguments in
the GNU style ('--foo' and/or '--foo bar' and/or '--foo=bar').  I think I'll
also look into being able to specify a control flag more than once (like
'-m onefile -m anotherfile -m thirdfile') and have it load values into an
array, but I figured this would be the easier first step.
-- 
 Matthew Weigel
 hacker
 un...@id...