[recovery] Support alternative, and slightly more standard, form

[ljharb]

https://web.archive.org/web/20201110211134/https://github.com/substack/subarg/issues/1

Filed by @ELLIOTTCABLE

I love the nested [ . . . ] form that you've settled on, here. I'd totally be down for using that for tasks like this.

However, a pattern I've seen round 'n about, is something like this:

--beep boop --beep -a=3, with the argument following each invocation of the name being passed through.

Concerns: this adds at least one, if not two, new layers of complexity; these need their own, individual consideration:

subarg would need knowledge of the names of the coming ‘pieces of code’ at parse-time; instead of those being flexible, and simply dropping into an argument-structure. Not Very Minimist™. Maybe there's a way around that.
if the form --beep -a 3 were to be supported, then subarg would have to collaborate with subordinate minimist invocations (to find out if -a consumes the forthcoming 3, presumably), which comes damn close to defeating the point. Luckily, I feel like that's an edge case, and forcing the -a=3 or -a3 instead of -a 3 is an acceptable compromise.
Perhaps not something to attack just yet; instead, an observation.

Response by @substack:

What about just taking a module that does a generic array split and then feeding the chunks into minimist to accomplish this?

update: turns out I already wrote a generic array splitting library 2 years ago: https://github.com/substack/node-split-by

var split = require('split-by');
var minimist = require('minimist');
var parts = split(process.argv.slice(2), [ '--beep' ]);
var beeps = parts.map(minimist);
console.log(beeps);

output:

$ node arg.js --beep 3 -a 5 --beep x y -b 2 -z
[ { _: [] },
 { _: [ 3 ], a: 5 },
 { _: [ 'x', 'y' ], b: 2, z: true } ]

Response by @ELLIOTTCABLE:

Er, that's not at all what I was suggesting (although a very similar approach to yours obviously makes this use-case pretty easy to simulate on the consumer's side):

$ node arg.js --beep 3 -a 5 --beep x y -b 2 -z
[ { _: ['y'], a: 5, b: 2, z: true },
 { _: [ 3, 'x' ] } ]

Response by @substack:

I'm not sure what the use-case is then. If you have multiple --beep args they will already show up as an array:

$ node example/parse.js --beep x 1 2 --beep y 3 4 -z
{ _: [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ], beep: [ 'x', 'y' ], z: true }