Is there a tool that generates C/C++ source code from XML (or something similar) to create command line argument parsing functionality?
Now a longer explanation of the question:
I have up til now used gengetopt for command line argument parsing. It is a nice tool that generates C source code from its own configuration format (a text file). For instance the gengetopt configuration line
option "max-threads" m "max number of threads" int default="1" optional
among other things generates a variable
int max_threads_arg;
that I later can use.
But gengetopt doesn't provide me with this functionality:
A way to generate Unix man pages from the gengetopt configuration format
A way to generate DocBook or HTML documentation from the gengetopt configuration format
A way to reuse C/C++ source code and to reuse gengetopt configuration lines when I have multiple programs that share some common command line options
Of course gengetopt can provide me with a documentation text by running
command --help
but I am searching for marked up documentation (e.g. HTML, DocBook, Unix man pages).
Do you know if there is any C/C++ command line argument tool/library with a liberal open source license that would suite my needs?
I guess that such a tool would use XML to specify the command line arguments. That would make it easy to generate documentation in different formats (e.g. man pages). The XML file should only be needed at build time to generate the C/C++ source code.
I know it is possible to use some other command line argument parsing library to read a configuration file in XML at runtime but I am looking for a tool that generate C/C++ source code from XML (or something similar) at build time.
Update 1
I would like to do as much as possible of the computations at compile time and as less as possible at run time. So I would like to avoid libraries that give you a map of the command line options, like for instance boost::program_options::variables_map ( tutorial ).
I other words, I prefer args_info.iterations_arg to vm["iterations"].as<int>()
User tsug303 suggested the library TCLAP. It looks quite nice. It would fit my needs to divide the options into groups so that I could reuse code when multiple programs share some common options. Although it doesn't generate out the source code from a configuration file format in XML, I almost marked that answer as the accepted answer.
But none of the suggested libraries fullfilled all of my requirements so I started thinking about writing my own library. A sketch: A new tool that would take as input a custom XML format and that would generate both C++ code and an XML schema. Some other C++ code is generated from the XML schema with the tool CodeSynthesis XSD. The two chunks of C++ code are combined into a library. One extra benefit is that we get an XML Schema for the command line options and that we get a way to serialize all of them into a binary format (in CDR format generated from CodeSynthesis XSD). I will see if I get the time to write such a library. Better of course is to find a libraray that has already been implemented.
Today I read about user Nore's suggested alternative. It looks promising and I will be eager to try it out when the planned C++ code generation has been implemented. The suggestion from Nore looks to be the closest thing to what I have been looking for.
Maybe this TCLAP library would fit your needs ?
May I suggest you look at this project. It is something I am currently working on: A XSD Schema to describe command line arguments in XML. I made XSLT transformations to create bash and Python code, XUL frontend interface and HTML documentation.
Unfortunately, I do not generate C/C++ code yet (it is planed).
Edit: a first working version of the C parser is now available. Hope it helps
I will add yet another project called protoargs. It generates C++ argument parser code out of protobuf proto file, using cxxopts.
Unfortunately it does not satisfy all author needs. No documentation generated. no compile time computation. However someone may find it useful.
UPD: As mentioned in comments, I must specify that this is my own project
Related
I work on unix.
I have my complete source code in unix in the form of building blocks and modules.
Like headers,sources files,make files etc.
I can copy all the files with the same directory structure to windows.
I need some tool which will convert all the source to html tags with all the links to functions,variables,classes,headers.There should be some tool to do this easily.
by this way it would be easy for debugging the code in a fast way.
Is anybody aware of such tool?
The term you're probably looking for is "documentation generator". You're specifically interested in ones that output HTML files.
Doxygen is popular, but if you want a master comparison list of documentation generators Wikipedia has a summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators
Looking at the output generated by the different programs (on projects that use them) will probably inform your choice of which meets your needs.
You can use doxygen to generate your documentation. In its basic form it will generate what you need but to add comments that appear in the final html you will need to use special style comments.
I am trying to develop a tool that inserts comments in C/C++ source files in pre-defined formats.
The comments could be:
file headers <-> file names required
class comments <-> class name required
function comments <-> function name required
Following points are required to be taken mind:
If the comments are already there in right format then leave them intact.
If the comments are broken them fix them and insert them.
Some desirable but non important features:
Check and fix the indentation.
Check if any breaks are missing in their respective cases.
Please suggest open-source / free libraries / logic to aid in this.
I guess you 've got two choices:
Generate the whole c/c++ code and headers from a template or scripting language and use this one to insert the preformated comments. This is of course not an option if you still got a lot of code.
Or you need a tool to parse the code into sth. you can further use. You could try doxygen to generate html, xml or some other format. Problem would still be, how to get the generated documentation back into your sources...
I was looking for a solution to store program settings or options or configuration in C++. These could be settings that are exposed in a GUI and need to be saved between runs of my code.
In my search I came across boost.PropertyTree which seemed to be a good choice. I know boost is well respected code so I'm comfortable using it and so I started developing using this. Then I come across boost.program_options which seems to allow you to do the same thing but also looks more specialized for the specific use-case of program settings.
Now I'm wondering which is the most appropriate for the job? (or is there a 3rd option that is better than both)
EDIT:
fyi this is for a plugin so it will not use command line options (as in, it's not even possible).
UPDATE
I ended up sticking with boost.PropertyTree. I needed to be able to save changed options back to the INI, and I didn't see a way of doing that with boost.program_options.
Use boost::program_options. It's exactly what it's for. In one library you get command line options, environment variables options and an INI-like configuration file parser. And they're all integrated together in the Right way, so when then the user specifies the same option in more than one of these sources the library knows the Right priority order to consider.
boost::property_tree on the other hand is a more generalized library. The library parses the text stream into a uniform data model. But You need to do the real parsing -- that of making sense of the blob of data for your needs. The library doesn't know when to expect a parameter when it sees a particular option string, or to disallow specific values or types of values for a particular option.
After some digging around I think boost.PropertyTree is still the best solution because it gives me the capability to save the options after changing them from within the program which is a requirement.
There is a non-Boost possibility too. Config4Cpp is a robust, simple-to-use and comprehensively documented configuration-file parser library that I wrote. It is available at www.config4star.org.
I suggest you read Chapter 3 (Preferences for a GUI Application) of the Practical Usage Guide manual to read an overview of how Config4Cpp can do what you want. Then open the Getting Started Guide manual, and skim-read Chapters 2 and 3, and Section 7.4 (you might prefer to read the PDF version of that manual). Doing that should give you sufficient details to help you decide if Config4Cpp suits your needs better or worse than Boost.
By the way, the indicated chapters and sections of documentation are short, so they shouldn't take long to read.
I have a schema (xsd), and I want to create xml files that conform to it.
I've found code generators that generate classes which can be loaded from an xml file (CodeSynthesis). But I'm looking to go the other direction.
I want to generate code that will let me build an object which can easily be written out as an xml file. In C++. I might be able to use Java for this, but C++ would be preferable. I'm on solaris, so a VisualStudio plugin won't help me (such as xsd2code).
Is there a code generator that lets me do this?
To close this out: I did wind up using CodeSynthesis. It worked very well, as long as I used a single xsd as its source. Since I actually had two xsds (one imported the other), I had to manually merge them (they did some weird inheritance that needed manual massaging).
But yes, Code Synthesis was the way to go.
I've been tasked with creating a tool that can diff and merge the configuration files for my company's product. The configurations are stored as either XML or URL-encoded strings. I'm looking for a library, preferably open source with a license compatible with commercial software, that can do these diffs. Our app is written in C++, so C++ libraries would be best, but I'm willing to look at libraries that are C#-specific since I can write a wrapper that exposes it to C++ via COM. Three-way diffs would be ideal, but two-way is acceptable. If it has an understanding of XML, that would also be a plus (since XML nodes can be reordered without changing the document, etc). Any library suggestions? Should I even consider writing my own diff tools in the hopes of giving it semantic knowledge of our formats?
Thanks to this similar question, I've already discovered this google library, which seems really great, but I'm still looking for other options. It also seems to be able to output the diffs in HTML format (using the <ins> and <del> tags that I didn't know existed before I discovered it), which could be really handy, but it seems to be a unified diff only. I'm going to need to display the results in a web browser, and probably have to build an interface for doing the merges in the browser as well. I don't expect a library to be able to help with these tasks, but it must produce output in a format that is amenable to me building this on top of it. I'm currently envisioning something along the lines of TortoiseMerge (side-by-side diffs, not unified), except browser-based. Any tips/tricks/design ideas on how to present this would be appreciated too.
Subversion comes with libsvn_diff and libsvn_delta licensed under Apache Software License.
Here is a C++ library that can diff what the author calls semistructured data. It deals nicely with HTML and XML. Since your data is XML it would make a lot of sense to use this instead of plain text diff. This is especially the case when the files are machine generated.
I am currently trying to use this library to build a tool that diffs Visual Studio project files. These are basically XML files and using a plain diff tool like Winmerge is too painful because Visual Studio pretty much mucks up the whole file by crazy reordering. The idea is to do some kind of a structured diff to address the problem.
For diffing the XML I would propose that you normalize it first: sort all the elements in alphabetic order, then generate a stream of tokens/xml that represents the original document but is independent of the original formatting. After running the diff, parse the result to get a tree containing what was added / removed.