How do I declare an option that takes an input value?

Question

I know I can declare and execute an option for my package using

\DeclareOption{myoption}{\typeout{I did it!}}
\ProcessOptions

but now I'd like to give the option a value:

\DeclareOption{type}{\typeout{You typed: \CurrentOptionValue}}

which would be used as follows:

\usepackage[type="hello, world!"]{mypackage}

Requirements on the value string is that it can contain at least some nonalphanumeric characters, like spaces, commas and dots (and maybe some others...).

Answer 1

For handling key-value input as package options, there are a few choices:

1. xkeyval
2. kvoptions
3. pgfopts

Of these, kvoptions is probably the most robust approach. The way that options are declared is to use \define@key (or \pgfkeys in the case of pgfopts) before processing the package options. With kvoptions you get some nicer wrappers, such as \DeclareBoolOption.

However, the LaTeX2e kernel does various bits of processing before the input gets anywhere near the key-value processor. As a result, I'd strongly advice considering using a post-loading macro to set keys rather than a load-time set of options. This is easy enough to implement:

\def\mysetupmacro#1{\setkeys{mypackage}{#1}}

which will then only need a basic key-value package: probably I would choose kvsetkeys, which provides \kvsetkeys as a more robust version of \setkeys.

Answer 2

The xkeyval package is your friend.