It sounds to me like you also need to start focusing on atomic functions and abstractions more in general. Your functions should do one things as I mentioned.

It sounds to me like you also need to start focusing on atomic functions and abstractions more in general. Your functions should do one things as I mentioned. Regarding "map," "reduce" is probably the one you want to learn first because you can express many functional constructs like "map" in terms of "reduce." As a general word, parsing command lines almost always tends to be ugly. My general advice here would be to use the built-in stuff or at least a well-used library as much as possible. If you are finding that you are doing a lot of work yourself or using reg-exs that you made, that's often a side that you are doing something wrong. Anyway, lots more but I don't want to overwhelm. Good luck!