Powerful command-line argument parsing library for C++, inspired by Python's excellent argparse library

This library provides almost all of the functionality of the Python argparse package, and also provides a similar API, albeit with a modern C++ flavor.

The code is licensed under the highly-permissive Boost Software License.

Features:

• Lightweight (single header + single source file, minimal dependencies, limited template use for fast compilation)
• Supports almost all of the functionality of the Python argparse package
• Automatically generates highly-informative help and usage messages
• Handles both optional and positional arguments
• Subparser support, which provides builtin support for git/svn-style sub-commands
• Supports flexible option syntax, including both Unix-style short options (-o) and GNU-style long options (--option) as accepted by getopt and getopt_long, as well as other option styles.
  • Multiple single-character options that don't take an argument can be specified together, e.g. -a -r -p can be specified as -arp
  • Unique abbreviations of multiple-character options can be used
  • A single argument to an option can be specified either as --long=value or as --long value.

Dependencies:

• Makes use of C++14/C++1y features, and therefore requires GCC >= 4.9 or Clang >= 3.5.
  • std::experimental::optional
  • std::experimental::string_view
• Boost >= 1.57
  • Boost.Any for storage of parsing results
  • Boost.LexicalCast for argument type conversion
  • Boost.Core for type printing in error messages