Hi!

I am trying to find the visible length of a string (I print the same number of backspaces as the string, so I can provide a crude 'progress meter').

The addition of colour codes has really complicated things as "\033[32m" doesn't display on screen, yet length("\033[32m") returns 5.

I have got round the problem with: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $str = "\033[32m coloured! \033[m";

my $visible_length = length( $str );
while ( $str =~ /\033\[\d*m/g ) {
  $visible_length -= length($&);
}

print "Visible Length = $visible_length (should be 11)\n";

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Is there a better way of doing this?

Edit by tye to put [ inside CODE tags

In reply to finding visible length of string? by ajr

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