xls2json VS kotlinx-cli

By Tammo Ippen [email protected] Issues: https://github.com/tammoippen/xls2json/issues ```

❯ xls2json --help Open an xls(x|m) file and transform to json. Usage: xls2json [-hlmsvV] [-D=] [-T=] [-t=]... [...] If no `--table`s are provided, then all tables will be extracted. All files will be processed one by one, each outputting on line of json. [...] xls(x|m)-file(s) to transform -h, --help Show this help message and exit. -V, --version Print version information and exit. -m, --memory Show memory usage information. -v, --verbose Show more information. --pretty Pretty print the JSON. -l, --list-tables List all tables. -t, --table= Specify the tables to transform -p, --password= Password for opening the input file(s). -s, --strip Strip empty columns and empty rows. -D, --datetime-format= The datetime format. [default: 'yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'] -T, --time-format= The time format. [default: 'HH:mm:ss.SSS'] By Tammo Ippen Issues: https://github.com/tammoippen/xls2json/issues

In Kotlin, I've been having a great time with kotlinx-cli. No macros involved or magic involved, and it's closer to the author's own ideals.

(And some less good ones https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli, despite being official)

Not exactly sure what you're doing, but check out https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli which is an official multiplatform solution for parsing incoming options. If you can use it in your case, great! If not, you might at least be inspired by the API (and how extensive even a "simple" idea can get).

For CLI programs in Kotlin, I suggest taking a look at kotlinx-cli or, especially, Clikt, for idiomatic Kotlin code without annotations and such. Of course, after having already written the program, you're most likely not gonna switch that out, but I just wanted to inform you about that.

What about the official command line parser from jetbrains? https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli

I think, you can use libs for that. ex: Clikt, kotlinx.cli, picocli

Nice work! Welcome to Kotlin, it’s quickly becoming my favourite language. (Former PHP, current Java dev here). You should check out https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli if you want to take it to the next level.

There is https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli but you'll have to weigh this against quality and completeness of third party efforts as you've already discovered (in any case you'll probably need multiple libraries).