CHAT: Wordwrapping (was: File converter)

On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, FFlores wrote:

>
> While you're at it, do you know, or have you made a program that can
> word-wrap text (not on screen, but actually inserting line breaks)?
> It should be easy, but I've tried with VBA and the resulting program
> somehow mangles the output in one way or another every time!
>
It is quite easy: look at the following.  There might be a better,
shorter and more pythonic way of doing it, but this works, is clear
and not too slow.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import string
import sys

def wrap(text, length=67):
  words=string.split(text) # chop text into words
  line = ""
  text2= ""
  for word in words:
    if len(line +" "+ word) >= length:
      text2=text2+line+"\n"
      line=word
    else:
      line=line + " " + word
  return text2 + line

if __name__=="__main__":
  if len(sys.argv) == 1:
    print "Usage: wrap.py text linelength"
  elif len(sys.argv) == 2:
    print wrap(open(sys.argv[1]).read())
  else:
    print wrap(open(sys.argv[1]).read(), int(sys.argv[2]))

Of course, there are lots of special cases this thimble of bytes
doesn't take into account, like paragraphs separated by \n\n, indenting
and so on - but if that's needed, I use _fmt_ ;-), if necessary from
my own programs.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt