parse-cmd: A simple command-line Java parser

Wikipedia defines parsing as follows:

"In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of tokens to determine grammatical structure with respect to a given (more or less) formal grammar.

A parser is thus one of the components in an interpreter or compiler, where it captures the implied hierarchy of the input text and transforms it into a form suitable for further processing (often some kind of parse tree, abstract syntax tree or other hierarchical structure) and normally checks for syntax errors at the same time."

When writing a Java console application, or an application responding to an input stream, without using a formal parser such as ANTLR - ANother Tool for Language Recognition, one ends up writing custom code each and every time; a generic approach to define and parse few application specific commands is needed.

A quick search on Google shows several tools to handle command-line options but generally I found these solutions complex. Access to a generic and simple parser was the beginning of parse-cmd.

Should you need a simple, less than formal, one-class Java command-line parser, take a look at parse-cmd.

An equivalent implementation using Scala of a command-line parser is available here.