Boost C++ Libraries: Ticket #3343: [Program options] add option to place description on the next line in output

afoglia@… — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:04:45 GMT

I'd like to second this feature request. We have a number of programs with a number of options for which an absolute file name is the default. That can easily squash the description column to only a few words wide. It would be much better if the description were on a second line.

boost-tracker@… — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:52:52 GMT

I want to add my vote to this request. The output format is completely unusable like that. In my specific case there are 7 characters left for the text. I would propose to always output the description at column 13 (or maybe 20), formating it as shown in the following example:

--parameter_name arg (="a very long default string")
            This options does something stupid to the "very long default string"
            which you can pass in after the parameter name.
--help      Print this help
--foo       A small option name but a very long description which continues and
            continues until it breaks.

best regards,

Brian

component, milestone changed

Marshall Clow — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:26:45 GMT

component None → program_options
milestone Boost 1.41.0 → To Be Determined

bec2@… — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:54:37 GMT

This feature request seems to have been abandoned, but it would really be wonderful if it could be implemented. Even better would be to have some options to control the formatting, so that we could specify the columns used to align the option names, arguments, and descriptions, the column number for breaking to the next line, whether or not default arguments values are displayed (and how they are displayed, in the case of an enum for example), and whether to put descriptions on a separate line beneath each option.

Thanks for considering this.

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:01:19 GMT

I'd like to vote for this feature request as well, in the sense that more flexibility would be useful here in general. I'm wondering whether a solution would be to give the building blocks of the formatting engine (currently hidden in the .cpp file in an anonymous namespace) a public interface, allowing users to use them individually and to replace or extend them as needed. For instance, I'd like to sort my options alphabetically, and this would be easy if format_description() & Co. had a public interface. I think this would make it relatively easy to solve this feature request - or leave the users with the possibility to do that themselves.

anonymous — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 12:56:24 GMT

+1 I was surprised to find that the format of command line output is hard coded. As a minimum, one should be able to:

Specify column no that description starts at.
Be able to have default values printed as part of the description (after the description) or not at all.