Python Curses Rectangle Border

Question

I am making a python program that makes heavy use of the curses.textpad.rectangle function. It draws a rectangle using ─┐│ characters. I would like to know if I could use any other characters as a border. I don't think the function itself supports it, so are there any other functions I could use?

For example, this code uses single lines for the border:

from curses.textpad import rectangle
from curses import wrapper

@wrapper
def main(stdscr):
    rectangle(stdscr, 2, 2, 10, 10)

I want to use double lines (using =#║ symbols). How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

The rectangle code shouldn't be too difficult to rewrite to do what you want:

def rectangle(win, uly, ulx, lry, lrx):
    """Draw a rectangle with corners at the provided upper-left
    and lower-right coordinates.
    """
    win.vline(uly+1, ulx, curses.ACS_VLINE, lry - uly - 1)
    win.hline(uly, ulx+1, curses.ACS_HLINE, lrx - ulx - 1)
    win.hline(lry, ulx+1, curses.ACS_HLINE, lrx - ulx - 1)
    win.vline(uly+1, lrx, curses.ACS_VLINE, lry - uly - 1)
    win.addch(uly, ulx, curses.ACS_ULCORNER)
    win.addch(uly, lrx, curses.ACS_URCORNER)
    win.addch(lry, lrx, curses.ACS_LRCORNER)
    win.addch(lry, ulx, curses.ACS_LLCORNER)

change (monkey patch) the curses.ACS_* or rewrite this function to, say, double_line_rectangle(...) and put the character you want in the curses.X spot. like this:

def rectangle(win, uly, ulx, lry, lrx):
    """Draw a double-line rectangle with corners at the provided upper-left
    and lower-right coordinates.
    """
    win.vline(uly+1, ulx, u'\u2551', lry - uly - 1)
    win.hline(uly, ulx+1, u'\u2551', lrx - ulx - 1)
    win.hline(lry, ulx+1, u'\u2551', lrx - ulx - 1)
    win.vline(uly+1, lrx, u'\u2551', lry - uly - 1)
    win.addch(uly, ulx, u'\u2554')
    win.addch(uly, lrx, u'\u2557')
    win.addch(lry, lrx, u'\u255D')
    win.addch(lry, ulx, u'\u255A')

Here's a lookup for all the cool unicode characters for drawing boxes