cwcwidth – bindings for wc(s)wdith

To compute the number of columns needed to print a string, POSIX.1-2001 and POSIX.1-2008 define two functions: wcwidth and wcswidth. Given a character or string, they return the required number of columns or error out with -1 if they encounter a nonprintable character. These functions are not available per default in Python, but are quite useful when the width plays a role for formatting outputs on a terminal.

Module documentation

The cwcwidth module provides the following two functions:

cwcwidth.wcwidth(wc: str) → int

Return the printable length of a unicode character.

cwcwidth.wcswidth(pwcs: str, n: Optional[int] = None) → int

Return the printable length of a unicode string. If the optional argument n is provided, only the first n characters of the string are considered.

Both functions behave in the same way as the functions with the same signture from the wcwidth module.

Example usage

>>> from cwcwidth import wcwidth, wcswidth
>>> wcwidth("a")
1
>>> wcswidth("コ")
2
>>> wcswidth("コンニチハ, セカイ!")
19
>>> wcswidth("コンニチハ, セカイ!", 5)
10

Users

cwcwidth is currently used by the following projects: