Module: Text Wrapper

Last Updated on 2023-04-20

This module simplifies the task of formatting text in fixed width columns and indenting it properly. Often, applications that needs to pretty print text or display data in tabular format end up doing the alignment, indentation and wrapping of each line manually by hardcoding spaces, tabs and line breaks or by just assuming that display width is unlimited (which is not true).

With this library, wrapping long lines of text while maintaining indentation requirements and proper line breaks management is straightforward.

Here is a simple example: the following text unwrapped would be presented as a single very long line:

There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.

But when wrapped at 50 characters per line, it will display nicely within the limited available width:

The capabilities of the library go much further with the following additional features:

• Indentation using any prefix string, which can be different for the first line of each paragraph.

• Tab expansion, where each tab character is expanded to a replacement string (can be spaces or anything else).

• Space replacement, where each spacing character (including <SPACE>, t, f, r) is replaced by a single space (’ ‘).

• Space collapsing, where multiple consecutive spacing characters are replaced with a single space (’ ‘).

• Line trimming, where spaces at the start or end of a line are eliminated.

• Breaking on hyphens, where compound words will be broken into separate chunks right after hyphens, as it is customary in English.

Parts of the documentation

Detailed usage

start here to understand how to build wrappers and see examples of different wrapper configurations in action.

API reference

check this out to see the documentation of classes, macros, etc. offered by this module