Parsing help output

[kitschpatrol]

It can be useful to parse the output of a command line tool's help (--help / -h) to generate documentation.

Of course this is a bit tricky since help output isn't consistently formatted, many tools have subcommands, etc., though one could probably cover a majority of tools by implementing parsers for the output of the most popular CLI frameworks (e.g. Yargs, Click, etc.)

I've partially implemented this via Chevrotain for another project (before discovering jc), with support for parsing Yargs and Meow help output.

This is ultimately used to automatically generate Markdown tables enumerating available commands and options of various tools in readme documentation.

Just a thought! Thanks for a brilliant tool.

[kellyjonbrazil]

Hi! That is an interesting idea... I was using the help text converter in zsh when first playing with autocomplete, so there may be some other cool use cases.