The JVM does the job of tokenizing (breaking the command line into separate
strings) for you.
Suppose your code looks like this:
 public class TestArguementProgram {
   public static void main(String args[]) {
       ...
   }
 }
Then, in your example, the JVM calls your main method with the following
String array argument:
  { "--arg1", "firstParameter", "--arg2", "secondParameter" }
A simple idiom to process such argument arrays is:

   public static void main(String args[]) {
       String arg1 = null;
       String arg2 = null;
       for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
           if (args[i].equals("--arg1")
              arg1 = args[i++];
           else if (args[i].equals("--arg2")
              arg2 = args[i++];
       }
       ... // do more things
  }

In real life you will have to add some error checking to cope with malicious
command lines.

A related question, has anyone else tried to pass UTF-8 (or other
Unicode) to java program via proram arguments.  Before entering
main(String args[]) JVM likely uses system's default character encoding
to make each member of args.

I encountered this situation, where I wanted to invoke a Java program
from a C program and pass UTF-8 data.   I considered retrieving bytes
from String instances passed to main and then creating String instances
with UTF-8 encoding, but decided that I did not know the details of
String's internals well enough to feel confident I was going to get
bytes out exactly.  So I encoded each UTF-8 character in something I
knew would be passed correctly and subsequently decoded on Java side.

Any suggestions?

All the best,
Opalinski
opalpa@gmail.com
http://www.geocities.com/opalpaweb/

dufffman@gmail.com sez:

Yeah, it's called GNU Getopt (Google is your friend).

Dima