How to stop ANSI colour codes messing up printf alignment?

Question

I discovered this while using ruby printf, but it also applies to C's printf.

If you include ANSI colour escape codes in an output string, it messes up the alignment.

Ruby:

ruby-1.9.2-head > printf "%20s\n%20s\n", "\033[32mGreen\033[0m", "Green"
      Green          # 6 spaces to the left of this one
               Green # correctly padded to 20 chars
 => nil

The same line in a C program produces the same output.

Is there anyway to get printf (or something else) to align output and not add spaces for non-printed characters?

Is this is a bug, or is there a good reason for it?

Thanks!

Update: Since printf can't be relied upon to align data when there's ANSI codes and wide chars, is there a best practice way of lining up coloured tabular data in the console in ruby?

Answer 1

It's not a bug: there's no way ruby should know (at least within printf, it would be a different story for something like curses) that its stdout is going to a terminal that understands VT100 escape sequences.

If you're not adjusting background colours, something like this might be a better idea:

GREEN = "\033[32m"
NORMAL = "\033[0m"
printf "%s%20s%s\n", GREEN, "Green", NORMAL

Answer 2

printf field width specifiers are not useful for aligning tabular data, interface elements, etc. Aside from the issue of control characters which you have already discovered, there are also nonspacing and double-width characters which your program will have to deal with if you don't want to limit things to legacy character encodings (which many users consider deprecated).

If you insist on using printf this way, you probably need to do something like:

printf("%*s\n%*s\n", bytestopad("\033[32mGreen\033[0m", 20), "\033[32mGreen\033[0m", bytestopad("Green", 20), "Green");

where bytestopad(s,n) is a function you write that computes how many total bytes are needed (string plus padding spaces) to result in the string s taking up n terminal columns. This would involve parsing escapes and processing multibyte characters and using a facility (like the POSIX wcwidth function) to lookup how many terminal columns each takes. Note the use of * in place of a constant field width in the printf format string. This allows you to pass an int argument to printf for runtime-variable field widths.

Answer 3

I disagree with your characterization of '9 spaces after the green Green'. I use Perl rather than Ruby, but if I use a modification of your statement, printing a pipe symbol after the string, I get:

perl -e 'printf "%20s|\n%20s|\n", "\033[32mGreen\033[0m", "Green";'
      Green|
               Green|

This shows to me that the printf() statement counted 14 characters in the string, so it prepended 6 spaces to produce 20 characters right-aligned. However, the terminal swallowed 9 of those characters, interpreting them as colour changes. So, the output appeared 9 characters shorter than you wanted it to. However, the printf() did not print 9 blanks after the first 'Green'.

---

Regarding the best practices for aligned output (with colourization), I think you'll need to have each sized-and-aligned field surrounded by simple '%s' fields which deal with the colourization:

printf "%s%20.20s%s|%s%-10d%s|%s%12.12s%s|\n",
       co_green, column_1_data, co_plain,
       co_blue,  column_2_data, co_plain,
       co_red,   column_3_data, co_plain;

Where, obviously, the co_XXXX variables (constants?) contain the escape sequences to switch to the named colour (and co_plain might be better as co_black). If it turns out that you don't need colourization on some field, you can use the empty string in place of the co_XXXX variables (or call it co_empty).

Answer 4

I would separate out any escape sequences from actual text to avoid the whole matter.

# in Ruby
printf "%s%20s\n%s%20s\n", "\033[32m", "Green", "\033[0m", "Green"

or

/* In C */
printf("%s%20s\n%s%20s\n", "\033[32m", "Green", "\033[0m", "Green");

Since ANSI escape sequences are not part of either Ruby or C neither thinks that they need to treat these characters special, and rightfully so.

If you are going to be doing a lot of terminal color stuff then you should look into curses and ncurses which provide functions to do color changes that work for many different types of terminals. They also provide much much more functionality, like text based windows, function keys, and sometimes even mouse interaction.