// SBT
"com.lihaoyi" %% "fansi" % "0.5.0"
"com.lihaoyi" %%% "fansi" % "0.5.0" // Scala.js or Scala-Native
// Mill
ivy"com.lihaoyi::fansi:0.5.0"
ivy"com.lihaoyi::fansi::0.5.0" // Scala.js or Scala-Native
Fansi is a Scala library to make it easy to deal with fancy colored Ansi strings within your command-line programs.
While "normal" use of Ansi escapes with java.lang.String
, you find yourself
concatenating colors:
val colored = Console.RED + "Hello World Ansi!" + Console.RESET
To build your colored string. This works the first time, but is error prone
on larger strings: e.g. did you remember to put a Console.RESET
where it's
necessary? Do you need to end with one to avoid leaking the color to the entire
console after printing it?
Furthermore, some operations are fundamentally difficult or error-prone with this approach. For example,
val colored: String = Console.RED + "Hello World Ansi!" + Console.RESET
// How to efficiently get the length of this string on-screen? We could try
// using regexes to remove and Ansi codes, but that's slow and inefficient.
// And it's easy to accidentally call `colored.length` and get a invalid length
val length = ???
// How to make the word `World` blue, while preserving the coloring of the
// `Ansi!` text after? What if the string came from somewhere else and you
// don't know what color that text was originally?
val blueWorld = ???
// What if I want to underline "World" instead of changing it's color, while
// still preserving the original color?
val underlinedWorld = ???
// What if I want to apply underlines to "World" and the two characters on
// either side, after I had already turned "World" blue?
val underlinedBlue = ???
While simple to describe, these tasks are all error-prone and difficult to
do using normal java.lang.String
s containing Ansi color codes. This is
especially so if, unlike the toy example above, colored
is coming from some
other part of your program and you're not sure what or how-many Ansi color
codes it already contains.
With Fansi, doing all these tasks is simple, error-proof and efficient:
val colored: fansi.Str = fansi.Color.Red("Hello World Ansi!")
// Or fansi.Str("Hello World Ansi!").overlay(fansi.Color.Red)
val length = colored.length // Fast and returns the non-colored length of string
val blueWorld = colored.overlay(fansi.Color.Blue, 6, 11)
val underlinedWorld = colored.overlay(fansi.Underlined.On, 6, 11)
val underlinedBlue = blueWorld.overlay(fansi.Underlined.On, 4, 13)
And it just works:
Unlike normal java.lang.String
s with Ansi escapes embedded inside,
fansi.Str
allows you to perform a range of operations in an efficient
manner:
-
Extracting the non-Ansi
plainText
version of the string -
Get the non-Ansi
length
-
Concatenate colored Ansi strings without worrying about leaking colors between them
-
Applying colors to certain portions of an existing
fansi.Str
, and ensuring that the newly-applied colors get properly terminated while existing colors are unchanged -
Splitting colored Ansi strings at a
plainText
index -
Rendering to colored
java.lang.String
s with Ansi escapes embedded, which can be passed around or concatenated without worrying about leaking colors.
These are tasks which are possible to do with normal java.lang.String
,
but are tedious, error-prone and typically inefficient. Often, you can get
by with adding copious amounts of Console.RESET
s when working with colored
java.lang.String
s, but even that easily results in errors when you RESET
too much and stomp over colors that already exist:
fansi.Str
allows you to perform these tasks safely and easily:
Fansi is also very efficient: fansi.Str
uses just 3x as much memory as
java.lang.String
to hold all the additional formatting information.
Its operations are probably about the same factor slower, as they are all
implemented using fast arraycopy
s and while-loops similar to
java.lang.String
. That means that - unlike fiddling with Ansi-codes using
regexes - you generally do not need to worry about performance when dealing with
fansi.Str
s. Just treat them as you would java.lang.String
s: splitting them,
substring
ing them, and applying or removing colors or other styles at-will.
Fansi was originally a part of the Ammonite REPL, but is now a standalone zero-dependency library anyone can use if they want to easily and efficiently deal with colored Ansi strings.
The main operations you need to know are:
-
fansi.Str(raw: CharSequence): fansi.String
, to construct colored Ansi strings from ajava.lang.String
, with or without existing Ansi color codes inside it. -
fansi.Str
, the primary data-type that you will use to pass-around colored Ansi strings and manipulate them: concatenating, splitting, applying or removing colors, etc.
-
fansi.Attr
s are the individual modifications you can make to anfansi.Str
's formatting. Examples are:fansi.Bold.{On, Off}
fansi.Reversed.{On, Off}
fansi.Underlined.{On, Off}
fansi.Color.*
fansi.Back.*
fansi.Attr.Reset
-
fansi.Attrs
represents a group of zero or morefansi.Attr
s. These that can be passed around together, combined via++
or applied tofansi.Str
s all at once. Any individualfansi.Attr
can be used whenfansi.Attrs
is required, as canfansi.Attrs.empty
.
-
Using any of the
fansi.Attr
orfansi.Attrs
mentioned above, e.g.fansi.Color.Red
, usingfansi.Color.Red("hello world ansi!")
to create afansi.Str
with that text and color, orfansi.Str("hello world ansi!").overlay(fansi.Color.Blue, 6, 11)
-
.render
to convert afansi.Str
back into ajava.lang.String
with all necessary Ansi color codes within it
Fansi also supports 8-bit 256-colors through fansi.Color.Full
and
fansi.Back.Full
, as well as 24-bit 16-million-colors through
fansi.Color.True
and fansi.Back.True
:
Note that Fansi only performs the rendering of the colors to an ANSI-encoded string. Final rendering will depend on whichever terminal you print the string to, whether it is able to display these sets of colors or not.
If you want to dig into deeper, there are a few more APIs you can use:
-
fansi.Str.apply(args: fansi.Str*)
orfansi.Str.join(args: Seq[fansi.Str], sep: fansi.Str = fansi.Str(""))
to conveniently join together multiplefansi.Str
s all at once, more efficient than++
for large numbers of inputs -
fansi.Str.{Sanitize, Strip, Throw}
for constructingfansi.Str
s while specifying how to handle errors -
getColors
/getColor
andgetChars
/getChar
methods onfansi.Str
to extract the raw data for your own use -
fansi.Str.fromArrays
to piece it back together
This allows you to perform fast, mutable array operations on the
color/character arrays if you know what you're doing and want to perform
operations that are inconvenient or slow to do through fansi.Str
's immutable
API. For example, if you want to do a bunch of work with colored strings and
then at-the-end render everything to HTML, you can manually walk over the
color/character arrays yourself and decide where to print HTML tags to give
the text colors.
fansi.Str
currently has a relatively skeletal API: it is slightly smaller
than what java.lang.String
has, and definitely much less than what is
available on scala.RichString
's extension methods. Feel free to implement
your own custom operations using fromArrays
if you can't find what you want
on fansi.Str
, or send a patch if you think it's arguably general enough to
be included in Fansi itself.
-
fansi.Attrs.emitAnsiCodes
Lets you manually emit the differentjava.lang.String
s that correspond to changes in color in an Ansi string.
For example, if you want to emit the Ansi codes that correspond to the transition from "No Color" to "Red", you can use
fansi.Attrs.emitAnsiCodes(0, fansi.Color.Red.applyMask) // "\u001b[31m"
Or the Ansi codes from "Red" to "No Color"
fansi.Attrs.emitAnsiCodes(fansi.Color.Red.applyMask, 0) // "\u001b[39m"
Or for any other combination of attributes
val attrs = fansi.Color.Red ++ fansi.Back.Blue ++ fansi.Underlined.On
fansi.Attrs.emitAnsiCodes(0, attrs.applyMask) // "\u001b[31m\u001b[44m\u001b[4m"
You can also pass in an errorMode
when parsing a string via ansi.Str(...)
to tell Fansi how to behave if it finds Ansi escapes it can't handle. You
have the options:
-
fansi.ErrorMode.Throw
is the default, to throw an exception and fail the parse if it sees an Ansi escape it does not recognize. -
fansi.ErrorMode.Sanitize
to remove the escape character but leave the remnants of the escape-sequence in the result that people can see -
fansi.ErrorMode.Strip
to remove those escape sequences entirely so that no trace of them remains in the final result
- Support for Scala-Native 0.5.0
- Dropped support for Scala 2.11.x
- Minimum version of Scala 3 increased to 3.3.1
- Dropped support for Scala.js 0.6
- Bumped Scala.js to 1.10 (minimum version supported is 1.8)
- Bumped Scala versions to latest (2.12.16, 2.13.8, 3.1.3)
- Added shorthands for constructing
fansi.Str
with various error modes viafansi.Str.Throw
,fansi.Str.Sanitize
,fansi.Str.Strip
- Renamed
fansi.Str.join
tofansi.Str.apply
, added a newfansi.Str.join(args: Seq[fansi.Str], sep: fansi.Str = fansi.Str(""))
method in its place
- Support for Scala 3.0.0
- Support for Scala 3.0.0-RC3
- Support for Scala 3.0.0-RC2
- Support for Scala 3.0.0-RC1
- Support for ScalaJS on Scala 3
- Support for Scala Native 0.4
- Support for Scala 3.0.0-M3
- Support for Scala 2.13.0 final
- Support for Scala-Native
- Added
fansi.Str.join
,fansi.Str#getChar
,fansi.Str#getColor
- Created a Patreon Page to raise money to try and fund the development of Fansi, PPrint, Ammonite and my other open-source libraries. If you've use these libraries in the past and enjoyed doing so, please chip in to support development!
- Publish for Scala 2.12
- Reduce memory usage by 134mb by not initializing huge lookup tables to parse truecolor colors.
- Fix #7: Parsing of true colors broken
- Added the
fansi.Color.True
andfansi.Back.True
colors, allowing you to specifyAttr
s that represent the 24-bit 16-million-color "True Color" range.
- Fixed a bug in
substring
that incorrectly threw an out of bounds exception forend == length
- Exposed the
fansi.Attrs.emitAnsiCodes
function - Renamed
Attrs.empty
toAttrs.Empty
for consistency with all the others
- Removed infinite-loop if parsing strings with Ansi escapes that are not recognized by Fansi
- Added
fansi.ErrorMode
parameter, to control behavior when un-recognized Ansi escapes are found.
- Doubled the speed of the
.render
operation - Doubled the speed of the
.overlay
operation - Added the
.overlayAll
method onfansi.Str
, to allow you to quickly apply multiple overlays onto the same string
- First release