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TextWrapping — wiki


This snippet of code will convert a string of text into a list containing the lines it would break down into for a certain font and width.

from itertools import chain

def truncline(text, font, maxwidth):
        real=len(text)       
        stext=text           
        l=font.size(text)[0]
        cut=0
        a=0                  
        done=1
        old = None
        while l > maxwidth:
            a=a+1
            n=text.rsplit(None, a)[0]
            if stext == n:
                cut += 1
                stext= n[:-cut]
            else:
                stext = n
            l=font.size(stext)[0]
            real=len(stext)               
            done=0                        
        return real, done, stext             
        
def wrapline(text, font, maxwidth): 
    done=0                      
    wrapped=[]                  
                               
    while not done:             
        nl, done, stext=truncline(text, font, maxwidth) 
        wrapped.append(stext.strip())                  
        text=text[nl:]                                 
    return wrapped


def wrap_multi_line(text, font, maxwidth):
    """ returns text taking new lines into account.
    """
    lines = chain(*(wrapline(line, font, maxwidth) for line in text.splitlines()))
    return list(lines)

So: 

pygame.init() 
font=pygame.font.Font(None, 17)
print wrapline("Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country", font, 120)
outputs: ['Now is the time for all', 'good men to come to', 'the aid of their', 'country']

Now actually displaying that text (which you will have to do line by line) is another matter.
But it was easier for me to display the text than to write this code to wrap a line, it really stumped me for a while.

(Update: An obnoxiously long word that rsplit can't break up would previously cause an infinite loop. Added a cutoff to start splitting the word once 'stext' stops changing). What this means from the point of view ? Is necessary to make modifications ?



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