Auto boxing on Console and Terminal

auto-boxing.md

Introduction

If at any given time you wanted to print something on terminal or your console and show box around it, have you tried playing with echo/printf command? With neatly typing each characters like below,

echo "┌────────────────┐";
echo "│ Cool New title │";
echo "└────────────────┘";

Here is a simple script that can be used to do the stuff in much cleaner way and has been inspired by this Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uv8KfUjRBU.

Basic Function

Now that we wanted to print somehting inside the box, we could create a simple function that can be extended to print a box as we like it.

Title_base() {
        inputText="${1}"
        top_left="${2}"
        top_right="${3}"
	bottom_left="${4}"
	bottom_right="${5}"
	left="${6}"
	right="${7}"
	top="${8}"
	bottom="${9}"
        printf -v Bar '%*s' $((${#1} + 2)) ' '
        top_bar=${Bar// /${top}}
        bottom_bar=${Bar// /${bottom}}
        printf "%s\n${left} %s ${right}\n%s\n" "${top_left}${top_bar}${top_right}" "${inputText}" "${bottom_left}${bottom_bar}${bottom_right}"
}

The above defines a function for us to print the Title in a box. Here is an example how we can call it.

Title_base "Cool New title" "┌" "┐" "└" "┘" "│" "│" "─" "─"

Output:
┌────────────────┐
│ Cool New title │
└────────────────┘

Wrapper to simplify

We could simplyfy this function call by writing simple wrappers like this.

# Simple Box
Title() {
	inputText="$1"
	top_left='┌'
	top_right='┐'
	bottom_left='└'
	bottom_right='┘'
	left='│'
	right='│'
	top='─'
	bottom='─'
        Title_base "$inputText" "$top_left" "$top_right" "$bottom_left" "$bottom_right" "$left" "$right" "$top" "$bottom"
}
# Bold Box
Title_b() {
        inputText="$1"
	top_left='▛'
	top_right='▜'
	bottom_left='▙'
	bottom_right='▟'
	left='▌'
	right='▐'
	top='▀'
	bottom='▄'
        Title_base "$inputText" "$top_left" "$top_right" "$bottom_left" "$bottom_right" "$left" "$right" "$top" "$bottom"
}
# Curved Edges Box
Title_c() {
        inputText="$1"
	top_left='╭'
	top_right='╮'
	bottom_left='╰'
	bottom_right='╯'
	left='│'
	right='│'
	top='─'
        Title_base "$inputText" "$top_left" "$top_right" "$bottom_left" "$bottom_right" "$left" "$right" "$top"
}

Thus, you may call them like this and see the output for youself.

$ Title 'Cool New title'
┌────────────────┐
│ Cool New title │
└────────────────┘

$ Title_b 'Cool New title'
▛▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▜
▌ Cool New title ▐
▙▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▟

$ Title_c 'Cool New title'
╭────────────────╮
│ Cool New title │
╰────────────────╯

Conclution

This is just somehting new I learnt and thought it might be helpful for others to learn.