Details
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Improvement
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Status: Open
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Nightly Builds
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None
Description
Just to suggest to allow the user to control the with of the first column of the generated output from HelperFormatter.print() method, for the option description.
Now this with is delimited by the longest option and some times it is not the best solution, because the width of the second column (description) in order to fix the maximum length (default 80) has to be short.
My suggestion is to give the possibility to the user to wrap the option definition (first column), in case it is going to be longer to a given value. This is useful for group options, for example something like this:
-report (-r)
-date|-list|-template|-param-names|-param-values|-format
-date (-d) date
-list (-l)
-template (-t) template [template ...]
-param-names (-pNames) name [name ...]
-param-values (-pValues) value [value ...]
-format (-f) format [format ...]
so the description field will be started after the longest option definition, at column position after:
-date|-list|-template|-param-names|-param-values|-format
a better solution would be nevertheless to wrap also this line to a given length, for example:
-report (-r)
-date|-list|-template|-param-names
| -param-values | -format -date (-d) date -list (-l) -template (-t) template [template ...] -param-names (-pNames) name [name ...] -param-values (-pValues) value [value ...] -format (-f) format [format ...] |
it is easy to see the line is wrapped because the indentation level, so now the second column, that is the description, will come after the -param-names option definition which is now the longest option definition.
Thanks in advance,
David Leal