Description tags

Descriptions are not just limited to regular raw text. Lanat allows you to use special tags in descriptions to create richer help messages.

Tags are names enclosed in < and > characters. They may contain a value that can be supplied (if the tag specified accepts values) by separating the tag name and the value with an equal sign. For example, <tag=value>.

Example

Let's use the <desc> tag. This tag is used to embed the description of another element into the current one.

@Command.Define(description = "Description of arg1: <desc=args.arg1>")
class MyCommand extends CommandTemplate {
	@Argument.Define(description = "This is the description of arg1")
	public String arg1;
}

Note the args.arg1 value in the <desc> tag. This is a route which references the argument named arg1 in the current command.

We can quickly check the result of this by using DescriptionParser#parse():

// create a command instance from the template
var cmd = ArgumentParser.from(MyCommand.class);

System.out.println(DescriptionParser.parse(cmd));

The output of the code above will be:

Description of arg1: This is the description of arg1

Last modified: 26 May 2024