Zugg Software :: View topic - Making a screen display

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 10:37 am

Here is the basic situation, when I send SCORE to the Mud I get a listing of a good deal of information. I am working on making it into a much easier to read, and more useful format by adding in things of my own. The code below works great until something changes in length, and then the whole appearance of that line is off. Is there a way to make sure the line ends in the same place regardless of how the variable changes.

Example - @LevelName could be Satusian or 1st Order of the Hyperphysical the change in spacing with each would be considerable. And I would prefer not to have to change it each time I gain a level or some small detail changes.

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 3:30 pm

You can use the %format function to return a string of a certain length. %format("&80s","lol") will return "lol" preceded by 77 spaces. %format("&-80s","lol") will return "lol" followed by 77 spaces. You can do centre alignment as well by chopping the string in half with %len, %left and %right.

Also, you don't need to use both {} and "".

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:13 pm

Excellent, I will play around with that.

Wanderer Joined: 01 Mar 2008 Posts: 64

that will work, if the string length is going to be 3 (lol).. but how do you handle if, say.. the mana changes from a 4 digit number to a 2 digit number?

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 10:08 pm

That's the whole point of the function - it will pad the string with spaces at whichever end you specify, up to the total length you specify. The string could be any length and it'll always be padded with enough spaces to give you a string that totals 80 characters.

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 7:34 am

Could you do me a favor and write up an example, I have been playing around with the functions for a few hours and just can't seem to put them together quite right.

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:15 am

Try using:

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 11:53 am

Bah, the forums are eating my extra spaces - imagine that where there's " Endurance:", there're actually four more spaces. You get the picture, I'm sure.

That's a terribly complex way of doing it, Charneus. %format will handle most of those calls for you.

First let's stick with something easy, right-alignment. I'm going to use the tenth line, the "kidney heal" line. So, what you want is "| Kidney Heal At:", followed by a five-character string that contains the variable @HealKidney and as many spaces as needed to get it up to five characters. This bit is very easy:

#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney))

You can test this out by changing the value of @HealKidney to different lengths:

HealKidney=10
#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney))
HealKidney=100
#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney))
HealKidney=1000
#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney))

And it's all nicely aligned.

For the rest of the line, you now want five spaces and the string "Endurance:" - that's easy enough to add:

#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney)," Endurance:")

The next part depends on how you want to format it. You could either do the current and max hp values separately, giving them each a five- or six-character string and keeping the position of the slash fixed. That would look like this:

#say %concat("Endurance:",%format("&6s",@CurrentEndurance),"/",%format("&6s",@MaxEndurance))

And this can be added to the first half of the string to give you the whole line:

#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney)," Endurance:",%format("&6s",@CurrentEndurance),"/",%format("&6s",@MaxEndurance))

You might prefer doing it this way, though:

#say %concat("Endurance:",%format("&12s",%concat(@CurrentEndurance,"/",@MaxEndurance))

Which uses a single 12-character string for both numbers and the slash. On the line with the kidney part, it'll look like this:

#say %concat("| Kidney Heal At:",%format("&5s",@HealKidney)," Endurance:",%format("&12s",%concat(@CurrentEndurance,"/",@MaxEndurance)))

You can do similar stuff with left-alignment - it's just about deciding how long you want the resulting string to be and slotting the dynamic bits between the static bits.

Finally, centre-alignment. I'll show you this with the second line of your example, pretending that the name can be held in a variable. I'm going to make the line 80 characters wide, because that's a pretty common wrap-length:

Name="Sanguinic Warrior, Saervok Nebre'seir"
FirstHalf=%left(@Name,%eval(%len(@Name)/2))
SecondHalf=%right(@Name,%eval(%len(@Name)/2))
#say %concat(%format("&40s",@FirstHalf),%format("&-40s",@SecondHalf)

You can test this code out with strings of any length to see what it does. Basically, it splits it in half and right-aligns the front half and left-aligns the back half. You can change the length (and, indeed, do strange wraps like three-quarters left and right) by changing the 40s and -40s values.

Adept Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 292 Location: Boston

Also if you have number data from score in a variable and use, say, &12s for strings, those wont display at all if your variable is a number or null. Probs you saw that there are number options in format, but thought it was worth mentioning as the help file assumes some genius I don't have.

Here is one using numbers and strings:

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 2:14 pm

I'm not sure what you're getting at Leitia. Numbers will be returned just fine as strings if you use the "s" format modifier on them - I demonstrate this in my post above. The other formats like "f" and "n" are an extra level of complexity and aren't needed in these simple cases.

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 3:14 pm

Hmmm. Hadn't known that about %format, Fang. I'm going to have to rewrite some of these padding functions now.

Mine served me well, regardless. Guess there are always more than one way to skin a cat. :)

Charneus

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 4:30 pm

Thank you guys very much, that was very helpful

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 5:09 pm

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 6:49 pm

According to the help file %format returns null if there is a problem with any of the format specifiers, so it appears as if it thinks there is something wrong with them here. As far as I can tell &s will not work with numbers and &d will not work at all. &s does work with strings and &n does work with numbers (although there is no way to get rid of the commas with this one). I didn't try the other format specifiers, so not sure what else may or may not work in zMUD. The closest I could come to what you were trying that seems to work is:

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 9:50 pm

Ah, that'll be where the problems came from then - I used CMUD to test this since I don't have zMUD installed any more.

Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2009 12:41 am

By the way, Fang... was thinking about your %format suggestion, and then I realized why I use what I use.

It allows more versatility. You can use any number (say you want to change it down the future, or use it in different scripts). It also allows for someone to use any type of character they want (using -, for example, or even *). Not sure how to achieve these two functions any other way. Only reason it has the 1+ in there is just in case a person uses an odd length string (like a string with 5 characters). It won't match up properly. *shrug*

If you've got a better suggestion, I'm open to it, though.

Charneus

Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:01 am

Using any number:

%format(%concat("&",%1,"s"),%2)

For centre alignment, you can either require half the line length as a parameter, or just halve it.

Using any character:

%subregex(%format("&40s",%1),"^\s+",%2)

%subregex(%format("&-40s",%1),"\s+$",%2)

If you're sure that the string you're using will never contain spaces, you could just use %replace or %subchar instead.

Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 8:15 am

One last question, if I wanted to color certain attributes within this code how would I go about it?

Adept Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 292 Location: Boston

Fang, your center align is very cool, ty

I replied offhand to the subject based on the ops mention of SCORE. The ops intent seemed to be art and I wanted to help in some way.

for me: #sh %format( "&-12s", @test22) will not work if test22=22 or 10 or 3

I just thought this was one of those 'druthers' projects which would lead in other directions and wanted to say what happened to me. I really was not trying to solve anything in particular.