verbal matrix
knit
Knit your strings!
knit is a Gleam library for formatting strings.
It is a replacement for my older glormat library, which had some fundamental issues in its design.[^1]
knit doesn't try to replace the string concatenation operator <>, it focuses on formatting values and leaves concatenation to the operator that was designed for it!
Usage
Rather than writing full formatters inline- which takes up lots of space- knit returns composed formatters that can be bound to short variable names (e.g. pad, crop, align, fmt, etc.), which are then called inline with the <> operator to paste the resulting Strings together.
Formatters are composable, and can be chained together to create more complex formatters. It's recommended to use the use keyword for this:
import gleam/io
import gleam/list
import gleam/string
import knit
pub fn main() {
let header = {
let title_case = {
use val <- knit.with
string.split(val, " ") |> list.map(string.capitalise) |> string.join(" ")
}
use val <- knit.new
title_case(val)
|> knit.margin_centre(2, " ")
|> knit.pad_centre(48, "#")
|> knit.margin_right(1, "\n")
}
let body_line = {
use val <- knit.new
val
|> knit.pad_left(40, " ")
|> knit.margin_centre(6, " ")
|> knit.margin_centre(2, "|")
|> knit.margin_right(1, "\n")
}
let value = knit.new(knit.pad_right(_, 16, " "))
io.println(
header("gleam sponsorship receipt")
<> body_line("NAME: " <> value("Jane Doe"))
<> body_line("")
<> body_line("SUBTOTAL: " <> value("$16"))
<> body_line("EST. TAX: " <> value("1.50 hugs"))
<> body_line("TOTAL: " <> value("$16 + 1.50 hugs")),
)
}
########## Gleam Sponsorship Receipt ###########
| NAME: Jane Doe |
| |
| SUBTOTAL: $16 |
| EST. TAX: 1.50 hugs |
| TOTAL: $16 + 1.50 hugs |
Further documentation can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/knit.
Development
gleam run # Run the project
gleam test # Run the tests
[^1]: My older library
glormatattempted to mimic the string formatting API style found in other languages such as Python or Rust- but without compile-time evaluation or some other kind of metaprogramming, the code had to be messy in order to work and didn't feel great to use. It also didn't really take advantage of Gleam's useful features.
warped leaf
midnight vale
jolly pewter
