parsing of strings containing flag notation

#!/usr/bin/env node
const mri = require('mri')
console.log(process.argv)
console.log(mri(process.argv.slice(2)))

./args.js -a -b '-c foo'

[
  '/usr/local/Cellar/node/16.0.0_1/bin/node',
  '/Users/j/web/pev2-cli/foo.js',
  '-a',
  '-b',
  '-c foo'
]
{
  _: [],
  a: true,
  b: true,
  c: true,
  ' ': true,
  f: true,
  o: [ true, true ]
}

Is that intended?

I would have expected this:

{
  _: ['-c foo'],
  a: true,
  b: true
}

Or maybe this (but I find the result above much more intuitive):

{
  _: [],
  a: true,
  b: true,
  c: 'foo'
}

[sntran]

I would also like to add a simpler case, in which mri parses incorrectly:

./args.js -

The hyphen (-) is very common to indicate stdin or stdout, but when parsed with mri, the result is:

{ _: [] }

Whereas, - should be part of _ key.

[derhuerst]

I think you’d have to do this: ./args.js -a -b -- '-c foo' or maybe ./args.js -a -b -- -c foo

Anything after a -- is always thrown into the _ key space.

That doesn’t solve my problem unfortunately, because I would like to treat -b like any other option/flag: I want to be able to put other flags behind. Using -- defeats the point of using a flag and leveraging mri’s parsing logic.