getopt 1.21.1

Breaking changes

• You can now store negative numbers like -12 even when storage mode is not “double” or “integer” (e.g. when storage mode is “character” or “complex”). If the option’s action is “store_optional” with a storage mode other than “double” or “integer” we will now store such negative numbers instead of treating them as a short flag bundle and if the option’s action is “store” we will store such negative numbers instead of throwing an error.
• For long flags the storage mode column of spec now only casts any taken argument values to the requested storage mode. In particular store_true now never casts to the requested storage mode and store_optional only casts to the requested storage mode when the optional argument value is present and taken. This was the documented behaviour and the previous/current behavior for short flags.

New features

• getopt() now has support for positional arguments (operands) (#2):

  • getopt() now has an operand argument that controls how positional arguments (operands) are handled:

    • "after--only" (the default) only collects operands that appear after a "--" separator.
    • "strict" (in addition to operands that appear after a "--" separator) collects tokens that do not look like flags and were not consumed as a flag argument, while still erroring on unrecognized flags.

    Any positional arguments are returned in the "operand" attribute of the output.

  • New getoperand() function to extract the positional arguments (operands) stored in the "operand" attribute of output of getopt().

• getopt() and getusage() now support action strings in column 3 of spec (#11):

  • "append" appends each argument to a vector each time the flag is used.
  • "count" stores integer count of each time the flag is used.
  • "store" stores argument value, legacy 1 supported as an alias.
  • "store_false" stores FALSE.
  • "store_optional" stores argument value if present otherwise stores TRUE, legacy 2 supported as an alias.
  • "store_true" stores TRUE, legacy 0 supported as an alias.

• New getfile() function returns name of calling script, it is an alias of pre-existing get_Rscript_filename().

• New getusage() function generates a usage string from a getopt spec matrix.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• getfile() now also checks the LITTLER_SCRIPT_PATH environment variable so it works when called from littler (#16).
• The spec argument of getopt() and getusage() may now also be a 4-5 column data frame (which will be silently coerced to a matrix).
• The list returned by getopt() is now of S3 class "getopt" and no longer contains an character(0L) ARGS element.

getopt 1.20.4

• Documentation tweaks eliminating a CRAN check NOTE.
• {covr} is no longer a “suggested” package in the DESCRIPTION file.

getopt 1.20.3

• Now by default getopt() won’t override a user specified opt argument if argv is in the global environment. Will continue to use argv as a default for opt if it is in the global environment and the user does not specify an opt argument (for littler compatibility).

getopt 1.20.2

• Now allows one to pass an empty string to a character option. Thanks Matthew Flickinger for bug report.

getopt 1.20.1

• Now explicitly imports the na.omit() method from the stats package. Thanks Derrick Oswald for bug report.
• Improved parsing for negative numbers preceded by a space instead of a ‘=’ sign. Thanks Roman Zenka for improved regular expression.
• Slightly more informative error message if storage.mode() coercion results in an NA. Thanks Roman Zenka for suggestion.

getopt 1.20.0

• Type of “numeric” in spec automatically cast to “double”. Previously users might have had an error passing negative numbers if they accidentally specified “numeric” instead of “double”.
• Project website moved to https://github.com/trevorld/getopt
• Exports new function sort_list().

getopt 1.19.1

• If a passed in option matches multiple options in the getopt specification but matches one exactly then getopt now uses that value instead of throwing a “long flag is ambiguous” error.

getopt 1.19.0

• Exports new function get_Rscript_filename() that returns name of calling script, {getopt} now uses this function value as default for command argument.
• Documentation improved and now highlights differences between {getopt} and {optparse} packages for new undecided users.