wcwidth

What is wcwidth?

The wcwidth npm package is designed to provide functionality for determining the display width of characters in the terminal. This is particularly useful for handling characters that may take up more than one column in width, such as certain emojis or characters from languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It helps in ensuring text alignment and proper spacing in terminal applications that deal with diverse character sets.

What are wcwidth's main functionalities?

Calculate display width of a string

This feature allows you to calculate the display width of a string, which is essential for text alignment in terminal applications. The code sample demonstrates how to use wcwidth to determine the display width of English and Chinese text.

const wcwidth = require('wcwidth');
console.log(wcwidth('hello')); // Outputs: 5
console.log(wcwidth('你好')); // Outputs: 4

Other packages similar to wcwidth

string-width

Similar to wcwidth, string-width calculates and returns the display width of a string in the terminal. It handles emojis and other wide characters as well. The main difference is in the implementation details and dependencies, where string-width might use a different approach or have updated character width mappings compared to wcwidth.

eastasianwidth

This package focuses on determining the East Asian Width property of characters, which is closely related to the functionality provided by wcwidth. While wcwidth calculates the display width considering various character properties, eastasianwidth specifically targets the classification of characters based on the East Asian Width attribute, which can be useful for applications dealing with East Asian languages.

README

wcwidth

Determine columns needed for a fixed-size wide-character string

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wcwidth is a simple JavaScript port of wcwidth implemented in C by Markus Kuhn.

JavaScript port originally written by Woong Jun [e-mail] (http://code.woong.org/)

Example

'한'.length    // => 1
wcwidth('한');   // => 2

'한글'.length    // => 2
wcwidth('한글'); // => 4

wcwidth() and its string version, wcswidth() are defined by IEEE Std 1002.1-2001, a.k.a. POSIX.1-2001, and return the number of columns used to represent the given wide character and string.

Markus's implementation assumes the wide character given to those functions to be encoded in ISO 10646, which is almost true for JavaScript's characters.

Further explaination here

License

MIT