zparseopts help

[TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com>]

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As I've mentioned before, I have been using zsh forever but feel like I
missed out on learning about 97% of what it can do.

For example, today I learned about zparseopts.

(Feel free to mock.)

I took a look through the `man` entry, but… I don't know what it is about
my brain, but I can read and re-read man pages and still fail to understand
what it is saying. I do much better with examples.

I did some googling and found
http://emg-2.blogspot.com/2008/01/zsh-unique-features.html and once I had
that I could go back and look at the `man` page to understand what it was
doing.

So here is my first attempt at using `zparseopts`:

zparseopts -D -E -A MyVariableNameHere -- a b -orange -grape -apple

if (( ${+MyVariableNameHere[-a]} )); then
        echo "Apple";
fi

if (( ${+MyVariableNameHere[--apple]} )); then
        echo "Apple";
fi

if (( ${+MyVariableNameHere[-b]} )); then
        echo "Banana";
fi

if (( ${+MyVariableNameHere[--orange]} )); then
        echo "orange";
fi

if (( ${+MyVariableNameHere[--grape]} )); then
        echo "grape";
fi

Questions:

1. Is there a way to combine the -a and --apple statements into one?

2. Are a series of 'if' statements the best way to handle these sorts of
options?

What I have been doing is something like this:

for MyVariableNameHere in "$@"
do
case "$MyVariableNameHere" in
-a|--apple)
echo "Apple"
shift
;;
-b|--banana)
echo "Banana"
shift
;;
esac
done

but that has the disadvantage of not being able to parse "-ab" as two
separate arguments. OTOH it's very readable and I don't have to worry about
very many chances of missing a closing bracket or brace!

TjL

ps - if anyone knows of a good place for zparseopts examples, please let me
know. Google was not very much help.