args-tokenizer

args-tokenizer is a lightweight JavaScript library for parsing shell commands with arguments into an argv array. This makes it easy to work with command-line tools and libraries that expect an array format for arguments, such as tinyexec.

Features

- Simple and intuitive API.
- Handles quoted strings and escapes correctly.
- Supports multiline input.
- Ideal for parsing human-readable shell commands, especially curl-style commands.

---

  Made at Webstudio, open source website builder.

---

Installation

Install args-tokenizer:

``bash
npm install args-tokenizer
`

Usage

Here's how you can use args-tokenizer to parse shell commands:

`js
import { tokenizeArgs } from "args-tokenizer";

const args = tokenizeArgs(ls -la "./src");
console.log(args); // ["ls", "-la", "./src"]
`

$3

args-tokenizer also supports multiline commands, such as:

`js
const args = tokenizeArgs(
curl \\
-X POST \\
"https://my-url.com"
);
console.log(args); // ["curl", "-X", "POST", "https://my-url.com"]
`

$3

One common use case is passing more human-readable commands into the tinyexec library:

`js
import { tokenizeArgs } from "args-tokenizer";
import { x } from "tinyexec";

const [command, ...args] = tokenizeArgs("ls -la");
const result = await x(command, args);
console.log(result.stdout);
`

API

$3

Parses a shell command string into an array of arguments. Properly handles:

- Quoted strings (e.g., '"./path/to/file"').
- Escaped characters (e.g., \").
- Multiline commands (e.g., lines ending with \\).

$3

- loose: If true, the tokenizer will not throw an error when closing quotes are missing. Default is false.

#### Examples

`js
// Without loose option (default behavior)
// This will throw an error due to the missing closing quote
tokenizeArgs('command "arg1 arg2');

// With loose option enabled
const args = tokenizeArgs('command "arg1 arg2', { loose: true });
// ['command', 'arg1 arg2']
``

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests to improve the library.