Specify a nil in command line args - ruby

Question

I have a command line tool which generates a flat json doc. Imagine this:
$ ruby gen-json.rb --foo bar --baz qux
{
"foo": "bar"
"baz": "qux"
}
What I want is this to work:
$ ruby gen-json.rb --foo $'\0' --baz qux
{
"foo": null,
"baz": "qux"
}
Instead of null I get an empty string. To simplify the problem even further consider this:
$ cat nil-args.rb
puts "argv[0] is nil" if ARGV[0].nil?
puts "argv[0] is an empty string" if ARGV[0] == ""
puts "argv[1] is nil" if ARGV[1].nil?
I want to run it like this and get this output:
$ ruby nil-args.rb $'\0' foo
argv[0] is nil
But instead I get
argv[0] is an empty string
I suspect this is (arguably) a bug in the ruby interpreter. It is treating argv[0] as a C string which null terminates.

Answer 1

Command line arguments are always strings. You will need to use a sentinel to indicate arguments you want to treat otherwise.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure you literally cannot do what you are proposing. It's a fundamental limitation of the shell you are using. You can only ever pass string arguments into a script.
It has already been mentioned in a comment but the output you get with the \0 method you tried makes perfect sense. The null terminator technically is an empty string.
Also consider that accessing any element of an array that has not yet been defined will always be nil.
a = [1, 2, 3]
a[10].nil?
#=> true
A possible solution, however, would be for your program to work like this:
$ ruby gen-json.rb --foo --baz qux
{
"foo": null,
"baz": "qux"
}
So when you have a double minus sign argument followed by another double minus sign argument, you infer that the first one was null. You will need to write your own command line option parser to achieve this, though.
Here is a very very simple example script that seems to work (but likely has edge cases and other problems):
require 'pp'
json = {}
ARGV.each_cons(2) do |key, value|
next unless key.start_with? '--'
json[key] = value.start_with?('--') ? nil : value
end
pp json
Would that work for your purposes? :)

Answer 3

Ruby treats EVERYTHING except nil and false as true. Therefore, any empty string will evaluate as true (as well as 0 or 0.0).
You can force the nil behaviour by having something like this:
ARGV.map! do |arg|
if arg.empty?
nil
else
arg
end
end
this way, any empty strings will be transformed in a reference to nil.

Answer 4

You're going to have to decide on a special character to mean nil. I would suggest "\0" (double-quotes ensures the literal string backslash zero is passed in). You can then use a special type converter in OptionParser:
require 'optparse'
require 'json'
values = {}
parser = OptionParser.new do |opts|
opts.on("--foo VAL",:nulldetect) { |val| values[:foo] = val }
opts.on("--bar VAL",:nulldetect) { |val| values[:foo] = val }
opts.accept(:nulldetect) do |string|
if string == '\0'
nil
else
string
end
end
end
parser.parse!
puts values.to_json
Obviously, this requires you to be explicit about the flags you accept, but if you want to accept any flag, you can certainly just hand-jam the if statements for checking for "\0"
As a side note, you can have flags be optional, but you get the empty string passed to the block, e.g.
opts.on("--foo [VAL]") do |val|
# if --foo is passed w/out args, val is empty string
end
So, you'd still need a stand-in