Allow multiple output formats, not just one. Current output flags are exclusive, and using JSON complicates things for reporting.

[duaneking]

I'm running very long processes with cloc, as I'm using it on the chromium codebase as part of cybersecurity efforts to help with security and privacy in the browser; I'm trying to use your tool to ease pain and make the world better.

It's a big code base, So having to redo a scan or do another scan to get output can take hours, so it would be a lot more efficient if I could run a cloc scan on a code base such as chromium using multiple output flags, so it will allow me to output to multiple files based n the formats requested.

But the current arguments are overridden too much, and so I'm not able to do this.

For example to get only markdown output per the docs:

cloc --timeout 300 --report-file=cloc_ci.md --md .

-> gives markdown output as cloc_ci.md, as expected.

And to get only json output per the docs:

cloc --timeout 300 --report-file=cloc_ci.json --json .

-> gives json output as cloc_ci.json as expected.

But what I want to do:

cloc --timeout 300 --json cloc_ci.json --md cloc_ci.md . -> and get both .md and .json files with the requested data.

The simplest way I can think of this working with full backward compatibility is that cloc simply make the --json and --md flags have optional arguments, And when it isn't used you just default to the current behavior. This preserves backwards compatibility. Then, if the optional arguments exists, you can just have everything output to the correct formats from the same data source on the same scan.

This would allow people to not have to run multiple scans to get the same data as output in multiple formats to multiple files, especially since I can find no tool that currently exists to translate the cloc json output into its equivalent markdown without me having to reverse engineer cloc to be able to write that code myself (I don't want to do that, cloc is your baby, and I'm trying to respect that by asking for this).

From a pure architectural perspective, it's better that the cloc tool output to different formats using its generated data source instead of be run multiple times to collect what ends up being the same data, just to output it into multiple formats. Having to generate the same statistics multiple times as very inefficient. At the very least, I'm respectfully asking that the JSON support be extended so we can get the other report types using its data easily.

[AlDanial]

I'll implement this. The report generation is definitely the gnarliest part of the cloc so it will take some time to figure out a clean solution.