OptionParser with the potential for endless arguments

Ruby on Rails
1

I’m writing a ruby script that will take a number of video and audio tracks, run a transcode job on them and monitor the progress. This is going to be called by the command line and the arguments will look like this:

--V1 /path/to/video_file_1.mxf --A1 /path/to/audio_file_1.mxf --A2 /path/to/audio_file_2.mxf

Right now I’m using OptionParser as such:

opts.on("--V1 X") do |video_track|
 options.video_tracks << VideoTrack.new({ :track => 1, :path => video_track })
end
opts.on("--A1 X") do |audio_track|
 options.audio_tracks << AudioTrack.new({ :track => 1, :path => audio_track })
end

This obviously is ridiculous because I’ll need to have a case for each potential track.

Ideally I would like to be able to regex the flags so that I don’t need so many cases. I’ve looked at the documentation and tried several things but I’ve had no luck. Could anyone help a guy out?

2

Have you tried thor. Not sure if it does what you want, but it is cool.

3

(in the microsoft paper clip voice) It looks like your using capital letters and numbers for your flags. Would you like to know about a website I use to write simple regex stuff? http://www.rubular.com/
it isn’t pretty but the following regex will grab a dash, any caps letters A-Z, and any digits
/ -+[A-Z]\d/

edit:
(the plus grabs 1 or more of the - flags)
and I tested it by throwing random characters in your dir paths and it seems like it will only evaluate if it starts with a -

you could do /--/ instead of /-+/which will only grab flags that start with --.