FAQs.md

FAQs

Why removing parsed command-line switches/options?

It destroys the original argv array, not compatible with other arguments parsing library.

This is because this library is used for short-lived programs, e.g. cli tools at beginning. It's very convenient to process remain arguments if we remove parsed command-line arguments, e.g. <comamnd> [-[s]|--switch]... arguments.

If you want keep original argc/argv, you can make a copy, then pass them to argparse_parse, e.g.

int copy_argc          = argc;
const char **copy_argv = argv;
copy_argv  = malloc(copy_argc * sizeof(char *));
for (int i = 0; i < argc; i++) {
	copy_argv[i] = (char *)argv[i];
}   
argparse_parse(&argparse, copy_argc, copy_argv);

Issues:

• https://github.com/cofyc/argparse/issues/3
• https://github.com/cofyc/argparse/issues/9

Why using intptr_t to hold associated data? Why not void *?

I choose intptr_t because it's a integer type which also can be used to hold a pointer value. Most of the time, we only need a integer to hold user-provided value, see OPT_BIT as example. If you want to provide a pointer which points to a large amount of data, you can cast it to intptr_t and cast it back to original pointer in callback function.