Is it possible to pass array command line arguments nodejs?

Question

I want to create a script and to launch with yarn like this:

yarn start arg1, arg2, arg3

it's work fine, I recover all arguments in:

  const args = process.argv.slice(2);

But if I want to do:

yarn start arg1, arg2, arg3, ['option1', 'option2']

it's not work, I got an error:

zsh: no matches found: [option1]

I need an array of options sometimes and args can be infinite

Thank you

Answer 1

process.argv will contain all arguments you pass, no matter how many there are.

The error you're getting is from your shell (zsh), not Node or Yarn – you need to quote arguments that have special characters such as [] :

yarn start arg1 arg2 arg3 "['option1', 'option2']"

– here's a small example program to show the output:

/tmp $ echo 'console.log(process.argv)' > args.js
/tmp $ node args.js arg1 arg2 arg3 "['option1', 'option2']"
[
  '/usr/local/bin/node',
  '/tmp/args.js',
  'arg1',
  'arg2',
  'arg3',
  "['option1', 'option2']"
]

Answer 2

I had same basic question - this pointed me in the right direction: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41402909/826308

In my case I also needed to get to an array even if JSON.parse() failed so I used this:

function stringToArray(str){
    var arr = [];
    if(str.indexOf('[',0) > -1 && str.indexOf(']',0) > -1){
    arr = JSON.parse(str);
  }else{
    arr.push(str);
  }
  return arr;
}