I once needed to word wrap a string that had embedded HTMLish color tags, like: "press <red>X<grey> for status" Text::Wrap considered the <red> and <grey> bits as part of the string, but they would really later be converted to escape codes. With no way to tell Text::Wrap to consider certain parts of the string as having zero-width, I rolled my own useful word wrap routine that can disregard parts of the string, yet leave them in the right places.
sub wrap {
  my $width = shift;
  my @msgs;
  foreach my $in (@_) {
    my $realline = "";
    my $line = "";
    # Leading whitespace SHOULD be preserved!!!
    my $lead;
    if ($in =~ s/^(\s+)//) {
      $realline .= $1;
      $line .= $1;
      $lead = 1;
    } else {
      $lead = 0;
    }
    # My homegrown word wrap that disregards <color> tags!
    foreach my $realword (split(/\s/, $in)) {
      # Strip the word first.
      my $word = $realword;
      $word =~ s/<[^>]+>//g;
      if (length($line) + length($word) + 1 <= $width) {
        $word = " $word" unless length($line) == 0 or $lead;
        $realword = " $realword" unless length($realline) == 0 or $lea
+d;
        $line .= $word;
        $realline .= $realword;
      } else {
        push @msgs, $realline;
        $line = $word;
        $realline = $realword;
      }
      $lead = 0;
    }
    # Leftovers!
    push @msgs, $realline;
  }
  return @msgs;
}

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In reply to Word wrap that can skip by dabreegster

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