Textwrap is a small Rust crate for word wrapping text. You can use it to format strings for display in commandline applications. The crate name and interface is inspired by the Python textwrap module.
Add this to your Cargo.toml
:
[dependencies] textwrap = "0.7"
and this to your crate root:
extern crate textwrap;
If you would like to have automatic hyphenation, specify the dependency as:
[dependencies] textwrap = { version: "0.7", features: ["hyphenation"] }
Word wrapping single strings is easy using the fill
function:
extern crate textwrap; use textwrap::fill; fn main() { let text = "textwrap: a small library for wrapping text."; println!("{}", fill(text, 18)); }
The output is
textwrap: a small library for wrapping text.
With the hyphenation
feature, you can get automatic hyphenation for about 70 languages. Your program must load and configure the hyphenation patterns to use:
extern crate hyphenation; extern crate textwrap; use hyphenation::Language; use textwrap::Wrapper; fn main() { let corpus = hyphenation::load(Language::English_US).unwrap(); let wrapper = Wrapper::new(18).word_splitter(Box::new(corpus)); let text = "textwrap: a small library for wrapping text."; println!("{}", wrapper.fill(text)) }
The output now looks like this:
textwrap: a small library for wrap- ping text.
The hyphenation uses high-quality TeX hyphenation patterns.
The library comes with some small example programs that shows various features.
The layout
example shows how a fixed example string is wrapped at different widths. Run the example with:
$ cargo run --features hyphenation --example layout
The program will use the following string:
Memory safety without garbage collection. Concurrency without data races. Zero-cost abstractions.
The string is wrapped at all widths between 15 and 60 columns. With narrow columns the output looks like this:
.--- Width: 15 ---. | Memory safety | | without garbage | | collection. | | Concurrency | | without data | | races. Zero- | | cost abstrac- | | tions. | .--- Width: 16 ----. | Memory safety | | without garbage | | collection. Con- | | currency without | | data races. Ze- | | ro-cost abstrac- | | tions. |
Later, longer lines are used and the output now looks like this:
.-------------------- Width: 49 --------------------. | Memory safety without garbage collection. Concur- | | rency without data races. Zero-cost abstractions. | .---------------------- Width: 53 ----------------------. | Memory safety without garbage collection. Concurrency | | without data races. Zero-cost abstractions. | .------------------------- Width: 59 -------------------------. | Memory safety without garbage collection. Concurrency with- | | out data races. Zero-cost abstractions. |
Notice how words are split at hyphens (such as “zero-cost”) but also how words are hyphenated using automatic/machine hyphenation.
The termwidth
example simply shows how the width can be set automatically to the current terminal width. Run it with this command:
$ cargo run --example termwidth
If you run it in a narrow terminal, you'll see output like this:
Formatted in within 60 columns: ---- Memory safety without garbage collection. Concurrency without data races. Zero-cost abstractions. ----
If stdout
is not connected to the terminal, the program will use a default of 80 columns for the width:
$ cargo run --example termwidth | cat Formatted in within 80 columns: ---- Memory safety without garbage collection. Concurrency without data races. Zero- cost abstractions. ----
This section lists the largest changes per release.
Version 0.7.0 changes the return type of Wrapper::wrap
from Vec<String>
to Vec<Cow<'a, str>>
. This means that the output lines borrow data from the input string. This is a breaking API change if you relied on the exact return type of Wrapper::wrap
. Callers of the textwrap::fill
convenience function will see no breakage.
The above change and other optimizations makes version 0.7.0 roughly 15-30% faster than version 0.6.0.
The squeeze_whitespace
option has been removed since it was complicating the above optimization. Let us know if this option is important for you so we can provide a work around.
Issues closed:
Version 0.6.0 adds builder methods to Wrapper
for easy one-line initialization and configuration:
let wrapper = Wrapper::new(60).break_words(false);
It also add a new NoHyphenation
word splitter that will never split words, not even at existing hyphens.
Issues closed:
Version 0.5.0 has breaking API changes. However, this only affects code using the hyphenation feature. The feature is now optional, so you will first need to enable the hyphenation
feature as described above. Afterwards, please change your code from
wrapper.corpus = Some(&corpus);
to
wrapper.splitter = Box::new(corpus);
Other changes include optimizations, so version 0.5.0 is roughly 10-15% faster than version 0.4.0.
Issues closed:
self.width
hyphenation
Documented complexities and tested these via cargo bench
.
--foo-bar
Added support for automatic hyphenation.
Introduced Wrapper
struct. Added support for wrapping on hyphens.
First public release with support for wrapping strings on whitespace.
Textwrap can be distributed according to the MIT license. Contributions will be accepted under the same license.