Options appear in the order of defintion

[amagura]

Problem Description

Options in the hash produced by yargs appear in the order in which they were defined, rather than in the order in which they appeared on the command-line: this makes it impossible to determine which option(s)/operand(s) should be handled first.

Example

Consider the following example were both -h and -V are mutually exclusive in the sense that the program exits immediately after they occur.

// ya.js
var yargs = require('yargs')
  , args  = yargs
    .describe('h', 'print this message and exit').boolean('h')
    .describe('V', 'print version information and exit').boolean('V')
    .argv
  ;

var argz = Object.keys(args);
argz.forEach(function(arg) {
  if (args[arg] === false) delete args[arg]; /* without this, all options defined appear
 in the `args` hash, but with this, only options that were present on the command-line
 are retained in the `args` hash. */
});
var argz = Object.keys(args);
argz.forEach(function(arg) {
  switch(arg) {
    case 'h':
      yargs.showHelp();
      process.exit(0);
    case 'V':
      console.log('1.0');
      process.exit(0);
  }
});

No matter what order I put the options in, unless -V is passed by itself, it will never get handled because -h is defined before -V, and note that even if you change the describe(...) settings around so that -V is defined before -h, if you don't also update the .boolean(...) settings, then -h will still be defined before -V.

Proposed Solution

You can probably fix the above by simply adding options as they appear on the command-line, like so:

args = {};
process.argv.forEach(function(opt) {
  args[opt] = true; /* set to true just because this is only an example of a
 solution in theory, and not an actual working solution. */
});

[codelahoma]

The order of keys in the return value of Object.keys is implementation specific, and should not be depended upon.

[megawac]

You can just sort the result from keys? var argz = Object.keys(args).sort()

[amagura]

@megawac how does that help? That'll just sort them alphabetically: they need to be sorted according to the order of their appearance on the command-line.

@codelahoma last time I checked, yargs was meant to only work with nodejs, but maybe it works with other things, however, I only would use it with nodejs.

Closing this issue since it'll never be taken seriously by the people in charge of this repo.

[bcoe]

@amagura I definitely take this issue seriously, it's just a hard problem and I've been wrapped up working on a few big refactors.

Correct me if I'm wrong @codelahoma, in V8 Object.keys is insertion ordered?

[codelahoma]

@bcoe It's been hotly debated for over six years, but V8 does not always follow insertion order, and they continue to say it's WorkingAsIntended.

[amagura]

@bcoe my apologies, I was just a little frustrated at the time.

[adius]

It would be really cool if it was possible to retrieve the arguments in the order they appear.
Using an object, however, is the wrong way as they have no order by design.
The correct data-structure would be something like this I guess:

var argsSorted = [
  {
    name: 'width',
    value: '10'
  },
  {
    name: 'height',
    value: '10'
  }
]

But I'm not sure how it should be exposed. Maybe provide require('yargs').argvSorted.
Maybe we could also add the specified infos like required, default, … so that it can easily be used without having to cross reference.
What do you think?

[ErisDS]

This appears to be implemented and working now?!

[bcoe]

yargs-parser now appears to insert arguments in parser order, rather than the order that they're defined with .option().