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;
}