Clojure Q&A - Recent questions and answers in tools.cli

Answered: tools.cli: capture unrecognized options as unparsed arguments

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:40:33 +0000

Logged as https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-107 with a proposed syntax:

:subcommand :explicit will have the same meaning as :in-order true does today
:subcommand :implicit will have the behavior the OP wants here, i.e., an unknown option is treated as if there were an implicit subcommand present

Deprecate :in-order true (in favor of :subcommand :explicit).

Answered: Dependency between options in Clojure/tools.cli ?

Tue, 27 May 2025 15:28:13 +0000

There's nothing built-in. The simplest solution would probably be to post-process the result of calling parse-opts to check that if :a is present, so are both :f and :d.

I often wrap parse-opts in a post-processing step for "global validation" (that takes the result of parse-opts and produces an identical structure, with extra :errors entries).

Answered: tools.cli: Support default value for arg with value

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:08:37 +0000

The closest you can get is this:

clojure.tools.cli=> (parse-opts ["--diff="] [[nil "--diff NAME" "Diff" :parse-fn #(or (not-empty %) "foo")]])
{:options {:diff "foo"}, :arguments [], :summary "      --diff NAME  Diff", :errors nil}
clojure.tools.cli=> (parse-opts ["--diff=bar"] [[nil "--diff NAME" "Diff" :parse-fn #(or (not-empty %) "foo")]])
{:options {:diff "bar"}, :arguments [], :summary "      --diff NAME  Diff", :errors nil}

clojure.tools.cli=>

As discussed on Slack, there are reasonable cases for a value-bearing option to want to accept a string that starts with -- or just - (consider = to be optional here):

meta-command --option-to-use=--cabbage... \
--divider=--sep-- \
--value=-1

Answered: Incorrect docstring for parse-opts

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 20:13:25 +0000

This relates to https://ask.clojure.org/index.php/14260/providing-nil-for-long-option-tools-cli-does-seem-work-readme and I plan to update the docstrings and readme to fix both.

Answered: Providing nil for long option in tools.cli does not seem to work per readme

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:32:20 +0000

Try adding :required "MODE" after :id :mode.

When there's no long option in the form of --option ARG, the parameter is treated as a boolean flag, so you have to explicitly tell tools.cli that an argument is required by the parameter.

Answered: Can't know if value in option map is default or user-supplied

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 05:48:30 +0000

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're trying to do but I'm thinking the :default-fn option may serve you better?

Answered: Compile parser ahead of time

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 15:54:31 +0000

Created jira as https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-101

Answered: tools.cli: display default value for --[no-]foo flags in help summary

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 20:07:05 +0000

Jira ticket created https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-100

I'll take a look at the implications of this and see if there are reasons not to display defaults.

Answered: Tools.cli :validate: provide a way to post-validate (after updates)

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 21:09:55 +0000

https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-98 -- released in 1.0.206

Answered: Tools.cli :validate: provide function of invalid value in addition to fixed string

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 21:04:32 +0000

https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-97 - released in 1.0.206

Answered: Is it possible to parse positional arguments in tools.cli?

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 17:23:10 +0000

As the maintainer of tools.cli, I'm going to give this some thought and decide whether to create a JIRA issue for it.

Most programs that use tools.cli end up needing some boilerplate code for help/usage, as well as some additional parsing and/or validation of arguments so enhancing the library to make this easier would help "everyone" if it can be done in a fairly simple way.

One conceptual issue to figure out is that the format for specifying options is only for actual options (i.e., starting with - or --) so there's currently nowhere to "hang" any free text argument processing right now.

Answered: Review cli-matic for inspiration for enhancing tools.cli

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Reference: https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TCLI-92 (reported by seancorfield) - closed, no action required (README updated)