wrap_word: A Simple Ruby Method for Formatting CLI Output in Terminal
The Problem:
Last week I was working on a project (found here for those interested) that is designed to demonstrate the use of ActiveRecord in modeling Many to Many relationships in Ruby. A main feature of my end product is an info page output in terminal that allows users to get a brief summary of a company that meets their search parameters. Before implementing a formatting method, this was the output in OSX terminal:
Obviously, I wasn’t happy that one of my main features had “business” being truncated into “busine” and “ss”. After a brief foray into Google, I decided to create a simple method of my own to force clean word wrapping in long strings. Because my project handled long-form input strings from a database with 5000+ entries, I couldn’t manually edit each string. I needed a one-size-fits-all solution.
The Solution:
My improvised solution took form in a method I call wrap_word. The goal of wrap_word is to take in a string and return it with carriage returns added at a predetermined given width. The carriage returns will only be added in between complete words and will take into account if the input string has carriage returns present already.
def wrap_word(input_string, given_width = <default value>) #<default value> to be replaced with an integer by user array_of_characters = input_string.split("")
output_string = []
counter_variable = 0
array_of_characters.each do |character| #first check if the original character is a carriage return.
#If so, reset the counter variable. if character == "\n"
counter_variable = 0 #if not, check if the counter is greater than the desired width,
#also checking if the original character is a space.
#if so, replace it with a carriage return. elsif counter_variable >= given_width && character == " "
character = "\n"
counter_variable = 0
end
output_string << character
counter_variable += 1
end
return output_string.join("").to_s
end
The default value for given_width will change depending on the size of text you’re using in Terminal as well as the resolution of your display. A simple trick for finding the default value for given_widthfollows:
Copy a string the width of your terminal window:
Enter irb and run str.length on the string:
Subtract about 15% from the value to allow for margins, and you have your default value! In my example, the total width was 119 characters (my terminal was greatly magnified!) and I ended up using a value of 105 for my default value. Use yours in the method definition.
The Result:
I used this code to replace any longform string that would be output to my terminal. Whenever using puts [string] on a long string, the new syntax would be puts wrap_word([string]). Referring to the prior example of my project, the company descriptions output by wrap_word fit nicely on my terminal window:
This code could be improved upon by finding a more simple or automatic solution to the default value for given_width. Feel free to copy this code and improve upon it! After creating wrap_word I found that someone had created a ruby gem that seems to tackle the same problem from a different approach. Take a look at it here.
