Ucwidth - A small library to detect the display width in columns for Unicode texts

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Hi everyone!

I just published a small library, Ucwidth to help to detect the display width for any Unicode characters or texts. I think it might be useful if you’re working on something related to text typographing.

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Motivation

When developing a terminal-based Elixir application, I found a lack of some library handling character width correctly. Turns out there’s a need to port ucwidth (in C language) to Elixir.
So I made this porting with some additional features.

Key features

  • sticking to the latest Unicode standard, and can be updated easily thanks to Elixir’s powerful metaprogramming ability
  • Emoji support, even the combined ones

How to use?

Quite simple and straightforward:

iex> Ucwidth.width("👩‍🔬")
2

iex> Ucwidth.width("H")
1

iex> Ucwidth.width("你好, this is a lovely message 💌!") 
34

Feedbacks

I’m not professional at Unicode, just read some specifications and references. Also, this is my first project heavily using metaprogramming (special thanks to the book Metaprogramming Elixir).

So in a word, any comment is welcome!

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