Sometimes, neatness counts

If you are trying to puzzle out a stack trace, pick a critical line of text out of a long stream of console output, or compare two streams of binary data, a little bit of formatting can go a long way.

That's what org.clj-commons/pretty is for. It adds support for pretty output where it counts:

• Readable output for exceptions
• General ANSI font and background color support
• Readable output for binary sequences

Pretty can print out a sequence of bytes; it includes color-coding inspired by hexyl:

Pretty can also print out a delta of two byte sequences, using background color to indicate where the two sequences differ.

Pretty can output pretty tabular data:

(print-table
    [:method
     :path
     {:key :route-name :title "Name"}]
    [{:method     :get
      :path       "/"
      :route-name :root-page}
     {:method     :post
      :path       "/reset"
      :route-name :reset}
     {:method     :get
      :path       "/status"
      :route-name :status}])
┏━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Method ┃   Path  ┃    Name    ┃
┣━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
┃   :get ┃       / ┃ :root-page ┃
┃  :post ┃  /reset ┃ :reset     ┃
┃   :get ┃ /status ┃ :status    ┃
┗━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
=> nil

The print-table function has many options to easily adjust the output to your needs, including fonts, text alignment, and the table border.

Compatibility

Pretty is compatible with Clojure 1.10 and above.

Parts of Pretty can be used with Babashka, such as the clj-commons.ansi namespace; however, Babashka runs in an interpreter and its approach to exceptions is incompatible with JVM exceptions.

License

The majority of this code is available under the terms of the Apache Software License 1.0; some portions are available under the terms of the Eclipse Public Licence 1.0.