clap/examples/escaped_positional.md
Ed Page 32b5520ff1 docs: Call out features used in root examples
mitsuhiko immediately jumped into the examples and got tripped up by the
lack of documentation on feature flags needed.

I limited this to just the root ones because the rest are in a more
proper tutorial that steps through it all.
2021-12-08 16:46:49 -06:00

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This requires enabling the cargo feature flag.

You can use -- to escape further arguments.

Let's see what this looks like in the help:

$ escaped_positional --help
clap [..]

A simple to use, efficient, and full-featured Command Line Argument Parser

USAGE:
    escaped_positional[EXE] [OPTIONS] [-- <SLOP>...]

ARGS:
    <SLOP>...    

OPTIONS:
    -f               
    -h, --help       Print help information
    -p <PEAR>        
    -V, --version    Print version information

Here is a baseline without any arguments:

$ escaped_positional
-f used: false
-p's value: None
'slops' values: []

Notice that we can't pass positional arguments before --:

$ escaped_positional foo bar
? failed
error: Found argument 'foo' which wasn't expected, or isn't valid in this context

USAGE:
    escaped_positional[EXE] [OPTIONS] [-- <SLOP>...]

For more information try --help

But you can after:

$ escaped_positional -f -p=bob -- sloppy slop slop
-f used: true
-p's value: Some("bob")
'slops' values: ["sloppy", "slop", "slop"]

As mentioned, the parser will directly pass everything through:

$ escaped_positional -- -f -p=bob sloppy slop slop
-f used: false
-p's value: None
'slops' values: ["-f", "-p=bob", "sloppy", "slop", "slop"]