escaper

escaper lets you create your own formatting syntax. By design, expanding a format string with this utility requires no additional arguments (unlike fmt.Sprinf) by letting you easily register your own escape handlers. This makes it ideal for configurability, where only a string is necessary to specify a complex output format.

Motivation

There is often desire to make some program output user-configurable. A lot of software doesn't bother with configurability and has hard-coded output formats. This package aims to eliminate this unfortunate paradigm, and easily permit customizability where it is often disregarded. Inspired by the style of zsh prompt expansion, escaper makes output formatting a better abstraction for its users.

Install

go get github.com/lucasem/escaper

Examples

Basics

format := "add some ANSI %F{blue}text color%f easily"

esc := escaper.Default()
output := esc.Expand(format)

Advanced

format := "my name is %n, and the time is %D{3:04PM}"
name := "Ben Bitdiddle"

// use New() if you don't want the default ANSI escapes
esc := escaper.New()

// register a new escape
esc.Register('n', func() string {
  return name
})

// register an escape that takes an argument
esc.RegisterArg('D', func(arg string) string {
  return time.Now().Format(arg)
})

// "my name is Ben Bitdiddle, and the time is 11:15AM"
output := esc.Expand(format)

The Default

The default escaper (escaper.Default()) supports the following ANSI escapes:

• %F{<color>}text%f colors the text
• %K{<color>}text%k colors the background
• %Btext%b bolds the text
• %Utext%u underlines the text
• %Stext%s standouts (color inverts) the text

<color> can be one of:

black   (0)
red     (1)
green   (2)
yellow  (3)
blue    (4)
magenta (5)
cyan    (6)
white   (7)

License

The MIT License (MIT) - see LICENSE for details