argon Documentation

Welcome to the Argon documentation!

Building and Installing

These two CMake commands will compile and install Argon.

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release --target install

Depending on Argon

Argon provides a convenient CMake config module for finding and depending on it.

find_package(argon REQUIRED)
...
target_link_libraries(app PRIVATE argon::argon)

Getting Started

Here's a short example to help you see how Argon can be used.

#include <argon/Parser.hpp>
 
#include <iostream>
 
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
try {
    bool debug;
    int count = 0;
    double speed = 0.0;
    std::string output;
 
    argon::Parser parser(argc, argv);
    parser.add_option("h,help", "Show this help text", argon::USAGE, "Argon CLI parser example program");
    parser.add_option("version", "Print program version", argon::PRINT, "v0.0.0");
    parser.add_option("d,debug", "Debug output", debug);
    parser.add_option("c,count", "Number of instances", count);
    parser.add_option("speed", "Initial speed", speed);
    parser.add_option("o,output", "Output filename", output);
    parser.add_position("filename", "Input file");
    parser.parse();
 
    const auto filename = parser.get_position(0);
    std::cout << "Filename: " << filename << '\n';
} catch (const std::exception& ex) {
    std::cerr << ex.what() << '\n';
    return -1;
}

Create an instance of argon::Parser. Use add_option to add as many options as you want. The first argument is a comma-delimited string of flags and aliases. The second is the decription which appears in the help output. The third argument is a mutable references that gets modified according to what the parser detects. An additional 4-argument overload is provided for printing messages to the console where argon::USAGE indicates that a usage text is printed after the provided string whereas argon::PRINT simply prints the provided string then exits.

Here's what the formatted usage information looks like:

$ example --help
Usage
  example <filename> [options]
 
Argon CLI parser example program
 
Positions
  filename                Input file
 
Options
  -h, --help              Show this help text
  --version               Print program version
  -d, --debug             Debug output
  -c, --count <value>     Number of instances
  --speed <value>         Initial speed
  -o, --output <value>    Output filename