NAME

String::TtyLength - length or width of string excluding ANSI tty codes

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Table::Tiny / tty_length /;
$length = tty_length("\e[1mbold text\e[0m");
print "length = $length\n";

# 9

DESCRIPTION

This module provides two functions which tell you the length and width of a string as it will appear on a terminal (tty), excluding any ANSI escape codes.

tty_length returns the length of a string excluding any ANSI tty / terminal escape codes.

tty_width returns the number of columns on a terminal that the string will take up, also excluding any escape codes.

For non-wide characters, they functions will return the same value. But consider the following:

my $emoji  = "😄";
my $length = tty_length($emoji);   # 1
my $width  = tty_width($emoji);    # 2

If you're trying to align text in columns, then you'll probably want tty_width; if you just want to know the number of characters, using tty_length.

tty_length( STRING )

Takes a single string, and returns the length of the string, excluding any escape sequences.

Note: the escape sequences could include cursor movement, so the length returned by this function might not be the number of characters that would be visible on screen. But length_of_string_excluding_escape_sequences() was just too long.

tty_width( STRING )

Takes a single string and returns the number of columns that the string will take up on a terminal.

If you might have wide characters in your string, you should make sure you've installed Text::CharWidth, as that's used to calculate the width, after stripping any escape codes. If you don't have Text::CharWidth installed, we fall back onto using the length() builtin.

REPOSITORY

https://github.com/neilb/String-TtyLength

AUTHOR

Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2020 by Neil Bowers.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.