pharse - Command Line Option Parser for PHP

Chris Lane
18 Mar 2012
chris@chris-allen-lane.com
http://chris-allen-lane.com
http://twitter.com/#!/chrisallenlane

What it Does

pharse is a command-line PHP option-parser, heavily inspired by William Morgan's excellent Trollop option parser for Ruby. It is designed to be easy-to-use and idiomatic to PHP.

Installation

Simply require or include pharse.php into your PHP application.

Usage Examples

Usage is simple:

1. include or require pharse.php into your application
2. Create an associative array of program options
3. Optionally set a help banner by invoking Pharse::setBanner($banner)
4. Statically invoke Pharse::options($options) to engage the option parser

The included example.php provides a working, executable demonstration of the library's usage.

Known Issues

This script will likely exhibit undesirable behavior if more than 26 options are specified. This is because each short option is automatically chosen (if not explicitly specified) from [a-z], and the supply of lowercase letters will be exhausted beyond 26.

Also note that, unlike Trollop, pharse does NOT support nested options (as in git push origin master, git pull origin master, etc.) I don't need that functionality for the overwhelming majority of my own use-cases, and hence I did not take the time to implement it. If you find that you need this functionality, patches and forks are always welcome!

Beyond that, let it be known that this library was hacked out in about two hours one late night when I had nothing better to do. Unit tests have yet to be written, and testing was informal. Be sure to thoroughly kick the tires before choosing to deploy this library in a production environment.

Contact Me

If you have questions, concerns, bug reports, feature requests, etc, feel free to contact me at chris@chris-allen-lane.com.

License

This product is licensed under the GPL 3 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). It comes with no warranty, expressed or implied.