Grep-like argument parsing with clap

help
1

Hey there! I'm writing a program that works kind of like grep, so I'd like to parse the command-line arguments kind of like grep too, specifically the -e flag. But, I'm having trouble figuring out how to do this in clap. Basically, I want these rules to be true:

  • If you specify two arguments, they're taken as the language of a search and the query, e.g. ./tool rust '(_)'
  • If you specify other positional arguments after that, they're used as paths to search, e.g. ./tool rust '(_)' here/there/everywhere
  • If you want to specify multiple queries, you add -q before each, e.g. ./tool -q rust '(_)@q1' -q rust '(_)@q2'. This works with the files as well.

I'm having no luck doing this with Clap, even with the 3.0.0-beta.2 release. This seems like an unusual but not unheard-of pattern elsewhere. Is it too unusual for Clap? Am I going to have to drop down to parsing my own arguments out of argv?

2

For now I've just required -q for every argument, but I'd really like to not do that long term. Any other ideas?

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