grab-rs

A library for effortlessly grabbing input users provide to your CLI. Whether from files, stdin or just plain text on the command line, we've got you covered.

Installation

1. Add it to your Cargo.toml dependencies

   # Cargo.toml
   
   [dependencies]
   grab = "0.3"
   

2. Import and use it

   use grab::{ /* ... */ }
   

Usage

The main type exposed by this library is grab::Input. An instance of Input can be created via grab::Config::parse which takes a &str as input and attempts to parse it into a known Input source.

Currently, known sources are:

• The actual text (&str) passed in as input
• Your program's stdin
• A file

The default Configuration recognizes - for stdin per the unix tradition, and takes cues from curl -d by recognizing @<file path> as a file.

This means that you can easily support all three of the most common input sources with a single type. For example, assume we had a simple CLI tool named hello that prints out a hello to the user...

use structopt::StructOpt;
use grab::Input;

// We use the popular StructOpt library for our CLI skeleton
#[derive(StructOpt)]
struct HelloCLI {
   // Note we use Input instead of the typical String or Vec<u8>
   /// The name we're going to greet
   name: Input
}

fn main() -> Result<()> {
   // Parse our argument(s)
   let args = HelloCLI::from_args();

   // Access the user's input, reading it to a string
   let name = args.name.access()?.read_to_string()?;

   // Say hello!
   println!("Hello, {}!", &name);
   Ok(())
}

Now we can support all three of the following invocations with absolutely zero extra code:

$ hello John
Hello, John!

$ echo Bob | hello -
Hello, Bob!

$ print Fred >name.txt ; hello @name.txt
Hello, Fred!

License