Subject: Parsing Command Line Arguments in .NET || Topic: Add basic arg validation

[Felix-CodingClimber]

First, thanks a lot for the great starting point on building my own very simple command line arg helper.

One very simple thing I added was an last parsing step, to remove options passed without an name (only - or --).

I changed the method to return an info about the parsing process:
public static IReadOnlyList<CommandLineOption> ParseOptions(string[] arguments, out string info) { ...

And as a very last step, I added:

// Clean up invalid options (e.g. - or -- without name)
int invalidOptions = results.RemoveAll(option => string.IsNullOrEmpty(option.Name));

info = $"Parsed <{results.Count}> valid and <{invalidOptions}> invalid command line args";
return results;

[bytefish]

Thanks for the feedback. Great, that it's useful. 👍 Probably one could also add some options like passing a ParserOptions.Strict, so it either fails with an Exception for an empty option name or just ignores empty arguments. You could also think about returning a Parse Result instead of an out Parameter like:

public class ParseResult 
{
    public string[] Arguments { get; set; }

    public IReadOnlyList<CommandLineOption> Result { get; set; }

    public int[] ValidArguments { get; set; }

    public int[] InvalidArguments { get; set; }
}

Where ValidArguments and InvalidArguments could be the indices, that are problematic.

[bytefish]

I see System.CommandLine is still in PREVIEW. Do you know by chance, what's the official recommendation by Microsoft for CLI applications?