There are a lot of command line argument parsers written in Swift available on Github, so when I needed one for a client project I was surprised I could not find any which fulfilled these requirements:
handle --tag=value.
treat unrecognised arguments as an error and list them.
Nor could I find any where it would be relatively easy to add these features, since most just loop through the arguments from first to last and have one big function trying to find out what to do with each of them. That becomes messy quickly.
Dealing with file paths in Swift is cumbersome. Using only the standard library leaves us with Strings, which we can join together or split by /. It gets the job done but it’s not pretty, and we need a separate type so our methods can accept file paths exclusively and not just any old String. Foundation gives us this in NSURL/URL, which are also used for internet URLs so their method names are very general and long. E.g. url.deletingPathExtension().lastPathComponent to return the file name without the extension.
Before building the Swift compiler it might be a good idea to check https://github.com/apple/swift to verify the build is currently passing. And to free up as much memory as possible first you can shut down the graphical interface with sudo service lightdm stop.
In the previous post we implemented lazy splitting of collections, very useful for say splitting large texts into lines. But in SwiftShell I need the same functionality for text which is acquired piecemeal, like the output of a long-running shell command read sequentially, when needed. Because shell commands which are piped together in the terminal should get to work right away, and not just hang around waiting for the previous command to finish. Like this:
Both scripts start at the same time. The left one uses the functionality implemented below, while the right one reads the entire input into a string first, and therefore has to wait for the ‘linemaker’ command to finish before doing any actual work.
There are already methods for splitting collections in the Swift Standard Library, but they do all the work immediately and return the results in an array. When dealing with large strings, or streams of text, I find it better to do the work lazily, when needed. The overall performance is not necessarily better, but it is smoother, as you get the first results immediately instead of having to wait a little while and then get everything at once. And memory usage is lower, no need to store everything in an array first.
As of Xcode 7 beta 6, Swift no longer requires variadic parameters to be last in the function definition. Also argument labels are no longer required when combined with parameters with default values. So this all works fine now:
