NEWS

getopt 1.21.1 (2026-04-27)

You can now store negative numbers like -12 even when storage mode is not "double" or "integer" (e.g. when storage mode is "character" or "complex"). If the option's action is "store_optional" with a storage mode other than "double" or "integer" we will now store such negative numbers instead of treating them as a short flag bundle and if the option's action is "store" we will store such negative numbers instead of throwing an error.
For long flags the storage mode column of spec now only casts any taken argument values to the requested storage mode. In particular store_true now never casts to the requested storage mode and store_optional only casts to the requested storage mode when the optional argument value is present and taken. This was the documented behaviour and the previous/current behavior for short flags.

getopt() now has support for positional arguments (operands) (#2):
- getopt() now has an operand argument that controls how positional arguments (operands) are handled:
  - "after--only" (the default) only collects operands that appear after a "--" separator.
  - "strict" (in addition to operands that appear after a "--" separator) collects tokens that do not look like flags and were not consumed as a flag argument, while still erroring on unrecognized flags.
  Any positional arguments are returned in the "operand" attribute of the output.
- New getoperand() function to extract the positional arguments (operands) stored in the "operand" attribute of output of getopt().
getopt() and getusage() now support action strings in column 3 of spec (#11):
- "append" appends each argument to a vector each time the flag is used.
- "count" stores integer count of each time the flag is used.
- "store" stores argument value, legacy 1 supported as an alias.
- "store_false" stores FALSE.
- "store_optional" stores argument value if present otherwise stores TRUE, legacy 2 supported as an alias.
- "store_true" stores TRUE, legacy 0 supported as an alias.
New getfile() function returns name of calling script, it is an alias of pre-existing get_Rscript_filename().
New getusage() function generates a usage string from a getopt spec matrix.

getfile() now also checks the LITTLER_SCRIPT_PATH environment variable so it works when called from littler (#16).
The spec argument of getopt() and getusage() may now also be a 4-5 column data frame (which will be silently coerced to a matrix).
The list returned by getopt() is now of S3 class "getopt" and no longer contains an character(0L) ARGS element.

Now by default getopt() won't override a user specified opt argument if argv is in the global environment. Will continue to use argv as a default for opt if it is in the global environment and the user does not specify an opt argument (for littler compatibility).

Now allows one to pass an empty string to a character option. Thanks Matthew Flickinger for bug report.

Now explicitly imports the na.omit() method from the stats package. Thanks Derrick Oswald for bug report.
Improved parsing for negative numbers preceded by a space instead of a '=' sign. Thanks Roman Zenka for improved regular expression.
Slightly more informative error message if storage.mode() coercion results in an NA. Thanks Roman Zenka for suggestion.

Type of "numeric" in spec automatically cast to "double". Previously users might have had an error passing negative numbers if they accidentally specified "numeric" instead of "double".
Project website moved to https://github.com/trevorld/getopt
Exports new function sort_list().

If a passed in option matches multiple options in the getopt specification but matches one exactly then getopt now uses that value instead of throwing a "long flag is ambiguous" error.

Exports new function get_Rscript_filename() that returns name of calling script, {getopt} now uses this function value as default for command argument.
Documentation improved and now highlights differences between {getopt} and {optparse} packages for new undecided users.