Weekly Report 3: Playing with NodeJS

I made a test JavaScript file for NodeJS to practice working with it, and prepare more for the project.

The result (code here) is a small program with some options:

Options:

  -h, --help     output usage information
  -V, --version  output the version number
  -o <path>      File to write data to
  -c <path>      File to print
  -t <string>    Text to print
  -d <string>    Data to write to file
  -v <string>    Verbosity: DEBUG, INFO, LOG, WARN or ERROR

I made a custom logger and a program to parse passed arguments. The option to parse with the commander module, as seen here:

var program = require(commander);

program.parse(process.argv);

which is used in the quickscrape code as well, didn't really work for me. Maybe I did something wrong. When I run the following code

var program = require('commander');

program
  .option('-t',
      'Test A')
  .option('-T',
      'Test B')
 .parse(process.argv);

console.log(program);

like this

node file.js -t 'Test_A' -T 'Test_B'

the console outputs this:

{ commands: [],
  options: 
  [ { flags: '-t',
required: 0,
optional: 0,
bool: true,
long: '-t',
description: 'Test A' },
    { flags: '-T',
  required: 0,
  optional: 0,
  bool: true,
  long: '-T',
  description: 'Test B' } ],
  _execs: {},
  _allowUnknownOption: false,
  _args: [],
  _name: 'file',
  Command: [Function: Command],
  Option: [Function: Option],
  _events: { '-t': [Function], '-T': [Function] },
  rawArgs: 
  [ 'node',
    '/home/larsw/public_html/cm-repo/js/file.js',
    '-t',
    'Test_A',
    '-T',
    'Test_B' ],
  T: true,
  args: [ 'Test_A', 'Test_B' ] }

This doesn't seem right to me. If is understand correctly, 'Test_A' is passed to -t and 'Test_B' to -T. Instead, commander seems to say -t and/or -T passed (T: true is present when you pass only -t too), and two strings are passed without context. Maybe there's something wrong with the program.option() things. Maybe my knowledge about command line arguments is incorrect, but I don't think to this extent. Just the same, I made a parser myself. Not sure if it follows any standard, but it works for me, for now. I will update the documentation shortly.

Next week I'll look into norma to see how it changes the format of papers from XML/HTML to sHTML, and ChemicalTagger to see how it recognises sentences.