ghickey@… — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 01:47:44 GMT

I just ran into this problem too, though in my case I didn't pass in an empty option. I was testing a parameter with a length validator:

add_options()
        ("name", validated<string>(&m_name, length_max(64))->required(), "thing name")

When passed a value longer than the limit the code threw a boost::program_options::error_with_option_name, as expected. Calling that exception's what() method crashed the program in the same way as the original reporter of this bug described, except that in this case the "original_token" value in the error's m_substitutions map was empty. When passed an empty string, strip_prefixes() throws the same out_of_range exception as above.

The following patch will fix the problem:

--- a/boost/program_options/errors.hpp	2013-12-04 00:17:17.000000000 -0500
+++ b/boost/program_options/errors.hpp	2016-01-28 20:03:12.994847938 -0500
@@ -26,7 +26,10 @@
     inline std::string strip_prefixes(const std::string& text)
     {
         // "--foo-bar" -> "foo-bar"
-        return text.substr(text.find_first_not_of("-/"));
+        size_t pos = text.find_first_not_of("-/");
+        if (pos == std::string::npos)
+            return std::string();
+        return text.substr(pos);
     }
     /** Base class for all errors in the library. */

I'm using boost 1.58 on Linux.

Boost C++ Libraries: Ticket #11935: boost::program_options::error_with_option_name.what() throws std::out_of_range when an empty option is used in the command input