Validators

{% hint style='info' %} Improved in CLI11 1.6 {% endhint %}

There are two forms of validators:

• transform validators: mutating
• check validators: non-mutating (recommended unless the parsed string must be mutated)

A transform validator comes in one form, a function with the signature std::string(std::string). The function will take a string and return the modified version of the string. If there is an error, the function should throw a CLI::ValidationError with the appropriate reason as a message.

However, check validators come in two forms; either a simple function with the const version of the above signature, std::string(const std::string &), or a subclass of struct CLI::Validator. This structure has two members that a user should set; one (func) is the function to add to the Option (exactly matching the above function signature, since it will become that function), and the other is tname, and is the type name to set on the Option (unless empty, in which case the typename will be left unchanged).

Validators can be combined with & and |, and they have an operator() so that you can call them as if they were a function. In CLI11, const static versions of the validators are provided so that the user does not have to call a constructor also.

An example of a custom validator:

struct LowerCaseValidator : public Validator {
    LowerCaseValidator() {
        tname = "LOWER";
        func = [](const std::string &str) {
            if(CLI::detail::to_lower(str) != str)
                return std::string("String is not lower case");
            else
                return std::string();
        };
    }
};
const static LowerCaseValidator Lowercase;

If you were not interested in the extra features of Validator, you could simply pass the lambda function above to the ->check() method of Option.

The built-in validators for CLI11 are:

Validator	Description
ExistingFile	Check for existing file (returns error message if check fails)
ExistingDirectory	Check for an existing directory (returns error message if check fails)
ExistingPath	Check for an existing path
NonexistentPath	Check for an non-existing path
Range(min=0, max)	Produce a range (factory). Min and max are inclusive.