Multiple Arguments

johnirl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks
I'm currently working on a program that retrieves sets of data. This is working quite well now but I have to run my program several times for each type of retrieval I have to do.
What I would like to be able to do is specify what types of retrival I would like to do as arguments passed in before the program starts. The problem is that I need my program to be able to handle any number of arguments i.e. from one to infinity.
My question is how could I input all the arguments and how would I get my program to know when the arguments have ended?

perl program name argument
perl program name argument argument
perl program name argument argument argument
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etc
[download]

JohnIrl

Sum day soon I'Il lern how 2 spelI (r tYpe)

Comment on Multiple Arguments Download Code

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Re: Multiple Arguments by moxliukas (Curate) on Jul 22, 2002 at 09:02 UTC
Well, all the arguments are stored in @ARGV array, so you can get the length of it with `scalar @ARGV;` [download] or alternatively, you can find the number of the last element with `$#ARGV;` [download] I hope that helps...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Multiple Arguments by kodo (Hermit) on Jul 22, 2002 at 09:05 UTC
Hmm not sure if I understood what you mean, but maybe all you want to do is to use @ARGV instead of `$ARGV[0], $ARGV[1]`, etc? You could also do something like: `while (@ARGV) { local $_ = shift(@ARGV); ... }` giant	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Multiple Arguments by flocto (Pilgrim) on Jul 22, 2002 at 09:34 UTC
If you need more complex argument parsing then just shifting @ARGV (see above) you might want to take a look at Getopt::Long which provides POSIX compatible argument parsing. Regards, -octo	[reply]
Re: Multiple Arguments by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jul 22, 2002 at 12:58 UTC
All the passed arguments to your program are found in the (special) array `@ARGV`. And we have standard Perl idiom to iterate over an array, without the need to know the size of the array: `foreach`. So you'll get code like: `foreach my $argument (@ARGV) { ... do something with $argument ... }` [download] Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Multiple Arguments by dimmesdale (Friar) on Jul 22, 2002 at 14:01 UTC
you may also want to search CPAN for GetOpt::Regex, depending on your needs (http://search.cpan.org). It allows you to handle command line args flexibly with regular expressions (regexes).	[reply]