Inconsistent array parsing(string values are wrapped in an array instead of parsed)

[le0nik]

Original issue: yargs/yargs#789.

The string values are parsed correctly in case of boolean or number values, but are not in case of array. Something like https://github.com/mccormicka/string-argv could be used to parse strings into arrays(simple parsing might not work because quotes must be considered, too).

Passed through cli:

const argv = require('yargs')
  .options({
    arr: {
      type: 'array',
    },
  })
  .argv;

console.log('argv', argv);

$ node ./test.js --arr foo bar
Outputs: argv { _: [], arr: [ 'foo', 'bar' ], '$0': 'test.js' }

Passed through .config()

const argv = require('yargs')
  .config({
    arr: 'foo bar',
  })
  .options({
    arr: {
      type: 'array',
    },
  })
  .argv;

console.log('argv', argv);

$ node ./test.js
Outputs: argv { _: [], arr: [ 'foo bar' ], '$0': 'test.js' }

yargs@6.6.0

[bcoe]

@le0nik thanks for opening this issue; we're playing catch up right now, but will work on getting to this ASAP!

[JaKXz]

Good news! I have a failing test around this (I think). PR coming soon!

[bcoe]

@le0nik @JaKXz having revisited this, my feeling is that this behavior is actually reasonable -- although we may want to document it somewhere?

My expectation with .config is that that the object passed would already have split arrays and objects out, so something like this:

.config({
  foo: ["a", "b"],
  bar: {
     a: 99,
     b: 33
   }
})

This makes it easy to load a JSON configuration file of disk and use it to populate yargs. tldr; I don't think we should think of the values passed to .config as unparsed command line values, rather they're an intermediate JSON representation.