How may I configure parsing of options that are quoted along with their value?

[chabala]

I am converting a tool to use Picocli, and things were going well until I found a place where the app is being called with quotes grouping the options with their values, e.g.

"--option value" "--anotheroption anothervalue"

It was parsing okay without any quotes, and it will parse okay if I add equals signs to join the option and value, but I can't figure out how to make it parse as is. The error is Unknown option "--option value". Am I missing a configuration flag? What I found seemed to be about quoting or splitting of values only.

[remkop]

Hello @chabala, thank you for your question.

I believe this is expected behavior by the shell.

The shell will pass the quoted value as a single string element in the array passed to the main method of your Java program.
You can test this with a simple Java program without picocli.

[chabala]

Sure, but is there a way can I handle this behavior in Picocli, i.e. breaking it up so that the option can be matched and the remainder captured as the value?

[remkop]

Picocli itself does not provide features for this, but one idea is
to take the String[] array that is passed to the main method, and split any strings that contain spaces into multiple strings, and combine them again into a single array, before invoking picocli.

[chabala]

Thank you, I can work with that. I'll probably make a pattern to search for things that look like long options followed by a space and break there, to avoid breaking values that have quoted spaces themselves.