parse_options.dox 5.52 KB
// doc/parse_options.dox


// Copyright 2009-2011 Microsoft Corporation

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//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
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namespace kaldi {
/**
   \page parse_options Parsing command-line options

   \section parse_options_introduction Introduction
   
   The class ParseOptions handles the parsing of command-line options given
   to %main() via argc and argv.  First we give an example of how we invoke
   a typical Kaldi program from the command-line:
   \verbatim
   gmm-align --transition-scale=10.0 --beam=75 \
       exp/mono/tree exp/mono/30.mdl data/L.fst \
       'ark:add-deltas --print-args=false scp:data/train.scp ark:- |' \
        ark:data/train.tra ark:exp/tri/0.ali
   \endverbatim
   The command-line options, which only have a long form (there are no one-letter
   options), must appear before the positional arguments.  In this case there are
   six positional arguments, starting from \c "exp/mono/tree"; notice that the
   one starting with \c "ark:add-deltas" is a single string with spaces in it;
   the single-quotes get interpreted by the shell; this argument gets invoked
   as a pipe.

  \section parse_options_example Example of parsing command-line options

   We will illustrate how these options get handled at the C++ level by
   introducing some of the code from gmm-align.cc (we have modified
   it slightly to make it clearer):
\code
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  try { // try-catch block is standard and relates to handling of errors.
    using namespace kaldi;

    const char *usage =
        "Align features given [GMM-based] models.\n" 
        "Usage: align-gmm [options] tree-in model-in lexicon-fst-in feature-rspecifier "
        "transcriptions-rspecifier alignments-wspecifier\n";

    // Initialize the ParseOptions object with the usage string.
    ParseOptions po(usage);

    // Declare options and set default values.
    bool binary = false;
    BaseFloat beam = 200.0;
    // Below is a structure containing options; its initializer sets defaults.
    TrainingGraphCompilerOptions gopts;

    // Register the options with the ParseOptions object.
    po.Register("binary", &binary, "Write output in binary mode");
    po.Register("beam", &beam, "Decoding beam");
    gopts.Register(&po);

    // The command-line options get parsed here.
    po.Read(argc, argv);

    // Check that there are a valid number of positional arguments.
    if(po.NumArgs() != 6) {
      po.PrintUsage();
      exit(1);
    }

    // The positional arguments get read here (they can only be obtained
    // from ParseOptions as strings).
    std::string tree_in_filename = po.GetArg(1);
    ...
    std::string alignment_wspecifier = po.GetArg(6);

    ...   
  } catch(const std::exception& e) {
    std::cerr << e.what();
    return -1;
  }
}
\endcode    
The code above is mostly self-explanatory.  In a normal Kaldi program, the sequence
 is as follows:
  - You initialize the ParseOptions object with the usage string.
  - You declare, and set default values for, the optional arguments (and options
    structures).
  - You register the command-line options with the ParseOptions object
     (options structures have their own Register functions that do the same
     for all the variables they contain).
  - You do "po.Read(argc, argv);" [This will exit the program if invalid options were given]
  - You check that the number of positional options \c po.NumArgs() is in
    the valid range for your program.
  - You obtain the positional arguments with \c po.GetArg(1) and so on; for
    optional positional arguments that may be out of range, the convenience
    function \c po.GetOptArg(n) returns the n'th argument, or the empty
    string if n was out of range.
  
Typically when writing a new command-line Kaldi program, it will be easiest
to copy an existing one and modify it.
    
 \section parse_options_implicit Implicit command-line arguments

Certain command-line options are automatically registered by the ParseOptions
object itself.  These include the following:
   -  \c --config  This option loads command-line options from a config file.
        E.g. if we do --config=configs/my.conf, the file \c my.conf might
       contain:
\verbatim
      --first-option=15  # This is the first option
      --second-option=false # This is the second option
\endverbatim
   - \c --print-args  This boolean option controls whether the program prints the
      command-line arguments to the standard error (default is true); 
      \c --print-args=false will turn this off.
   - \c --help This boolean argument, if true will cause the program to print out a usage
        message (like other boolean arguments, just \c --help counts as true).  You 
        can usually get the usage message just by omitting all command-line arguments, because most
        programs require positional arguments.
   - \c --verbose This controls the verbose level, so that messages logged with KALDI_VLOG
        will get printed out.  More is higher (e.g. --verbose=2 is typical).
   
*/

}