Caution When Using Strings With Ansi Sequences

Important

The issues mentioned below are not exclusive to adorable. Other ansi related libraries will serve the same or similar results.

adorable will generate strings that are likely to contain ansi sequences. The sequences are invisible when printing. They contain information about what style to use or reset etc. Because these sequences are escaped characters, python (and other languages as well) will interpret these as characters.

>>> import adorable
>>> len(adorable.paint("Hello", style = adorable.BOLD))
14

Keep this in mind, when working with ansi strings.

Using textwrap with ansi strings

The textwrap library uses the built-in len function among other things to return wrapped text. So using it with strings that contains ansi sequences will return an unexpected output.

The library ansiwrap will only work for very basic colors and is therefore discouraged. However we might work on a project like textwrap in the future that will work for all ansi sequences.

Getting the visible length of a string

As shown above, the built-in len function will not take into account of invisible ansi sequences.

The adorable library provides a general regex pattern, that will match pretty much all ansi sequences. With that, you can create your own implementation of len:

>>> from typing import Any
>>> from adorable import ANSI_REGEX
>>> 
>>> def visible_len(x: Any, /) -> int:
...     if isinstance(x, str):
...         x = ANSI_REGEX.sub("", x)
...     return len(x)
... 
>>> import adorable
>>> visible_len(adorable.paint("Hello", style = adorable.BOLD))
5