In Python, what's a neat way to recursively wrap text to a set number of characters?

Question

I have this string:

text = "abc def ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz\nabc def ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz"

I wanna wrap it to a character width (e.g. 5) such that it becomes this:

abc d
ef gh
i jkl
 mno 
pqr s
tu vw
x yz
abc d
ef gh
i jkl
 mno 
pqr s
tu vw
x yz

Non-recursively, here's what I've got:

text_in  = text.split("\n")
text_out = []

width = 5
for line in text_in:
    if len(line) < width:
        text_out.append(line)
    else:
        text_out.append(line[:width])
        text_out.append(line[width:])

print("\n".join(text_out))

So, it gets things right only to leading order level:

abc d
ef ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz
abc d
ef ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz

How should this wrapping be done recursively or in some other neat way?

Answer 1

Regex solution:

import re

def wrap_text(text, width):
    if not width:
        return text
    else:
        return re.sub(r'(.{' + str(width) + '})', '\\1\n', text)

text = "abc def ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz\nabc def ghi jkl mno pqr stu vwx yz"

---

• (.{<width>}) - capture each <width> number of characters into the 1st parenthesized group (...)

Test case #1:

print(wrap_text(text, 5))

The output:

abc d
ef gh
i jkl
 mno 
pqr s
tu vw
x yz
abc d
ef gh
i jkl
 mno 
pqr s
tu vw
x yz

---

Test case #2:

print(wrap_text(text, 10))

The output:

abc def gh
i jkl mno 
pqr stu vw
x yz
abc def gh
i jkl mno 
pqr stu vw
x yz