How to pass special characters as string argument using structopt?

Question

I have a command line to search a word inside a file. I'm using StructOpt to get the word that the user wants to search.

#[derive(Debug, StructOpt)]
pub struct Command {
    pub word_to_search: Option<String>,
}

The problem comes when you write something like command -a . I know that the library is trying to do something with -a and there is no -a in the struct , so I tried: command "-a" but it displays:

error: Found argument '-a' which wasn't expected, or isn't valid in this context

Is there a way to pass special characters like -a and retrieve the information ( -a ) using StructOpt?

Answer 1

You don't need to change anything, you only have to call the command using command -- -a . The double dash is used to indicate that it's the end of options and in this case the rest is the word that the user is looking for.