Quickstart

The instructions contained here will help you to use Command Line Parser Library in short time and with little effort.

Get It

Create a Console Application with Visual Studio and write this command at Package Manager Console:

PM> Install-Package CommandLineParser

If you prefer source inclusion (as I recommend), follow these steps to get only required sources:

$ cd to/your/project/folder
$ wget https://github.com/gsscoder/commandline/raw/master/src/libcmdline/CommandLine.cs
$ wget https://github.com/gsscoder/commandline/raw/master/src/libcmdline/CommandLineText.cs

To get all project tree:

$ git clone https://github.com/gsscoder/commandline.git CommandLine

If you've downloaded the binary package from CodePlex, add a reference to CommandLine.dll binary using your preferred development environment.

Now let your code view library's public types:

using CommandLine;
using CommandLine.Text; // if you want text formatting helpers (recommended)

Type For Parsing Target

Add a new class to your project. You could name it Options (or as you like more).

class Options
{
  [Option("i", "input", Required = true, HelpText = "Input file to read.")]
  public string InputFile { get; set; }

  [Option(null, "lenght", DefaultValue = -1, HelpText = "The maximum number of bytes to process.")]
  public int MaximumLenght { get; set; }

  [Option("v", null, HelpText = "Print details during execution.")]
  public bool Verbose { get; set; }

  [HelpOption]
  public string GetUsage()
  {
    // this without using CommandLine.Text
    //  or using HelpText.AutoBuild
    var usage = new StringBuilder();
    usage.AppendLine("Quickstart Application 1.0");
    usage.AppendLine("Read user manual for usage instructions...");
    return usage.ToString();
  }
}

An instance of this class will contain command line arguments read from args[] array of the application's entry point.

Parsing rules are defined from various option attributes. According to this example following command line samples are allowed:

QuickstartApp -iMyData.bin --lenght=150

QuickstartApp -i MyData.bin -v

QuickstartApp -viMyData.bin --lenght 150

Parse Command Line

Now just invoke the parsing method and you're done!

var options = new Options();
if (CommandLineParser.Default.ParseArguments(args, options))
{
    // consume Options instance properties
    if (options.Verbose)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(options.InputFile);
        Console.WriteLine(options.MaximumLenght);
    }
    else
        Console.WriteLine("working ...");
}