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How to find the colour of any character in a line

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (23,120 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date

Thu 19 Apr 2007 12:56 AM (UTC)

Amended on Thu 19 Apr 2007 01:02 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message

Sometimes you need to find whether a certain part of a line from the MUD is in a particular colour (or just to simply find what the colour is).

The function below (in Lua) illustrates how you can "walk" the style runs to find which run belongs to a certain character. For example, to find the style of the character at column 10:



style = GetStyle (TriggerStyleRuns, 10)

Now you can find the colour like this:



textcolour = style.textcolour

backcolour = style.backcolour

This can be handy in a trigger where you need to detect (say), if a word is in red.

There are two ways you can get the style runs in Lua. The first is the fourth argument to a function called by a trigger. For example:


function my_trigger (name, line, wildcards, styles)

end -- function my_trigger

In this case "styles" is the table of style runs.

Another way is if you use "send to script (after omit)" then MUSHclient sets up a global variable called TriggerStyleRuns. That is for use inside the trigger, for example to omit the line from output and then redisplay it in a different way.

Here is the function:



--[[

GetStyle:
  Finds a style run corresponding to a given column 

  Returns nil if style run not found (eg. column out of range)

  If style run found returns: 
     * the style table (see below)
     * the character at that column
     * the style run number (eg. style 3)

The style table should contain the following:

  t.text        --> text of that (entire) style run
  t.length      --> length of the (entire) style run
  t.textcolour  --> text colour (RGB number)
  t.backcolour  --> background colour (RGB number)
  t.style       --> style bits (1=bold, 2=underline, 4=italic)

--]]

function GetStyle (styleRuns, wantedColumn)
local currentColumn = 1

   -- check arguments
   assert (type (styleRuns) == "table", 
           "First argument to GetStyle must be table of style runs")

   assert (type (wantedColumn) == "number" and wantedColumn >= 1, 
           "Second argument to GetStyle must be column number to find")

   -- go through each style
   for item, style in ipairs (styleRuns) do
     local position = wantedColumn - currentColumn + 1  -- where letter is in style
     currentColumn = currentColumn + style.length       -- next style starts here
     if currentColumn > wantedColumn then  -- if we are within this style
        return style, string.sub (style.text, position, position), item  -- done
     end -- if found column
   end -- for each style

   -- if not found: result is nil

end -- function GetStyle

You pass it:

The table of style runs
The column you are interested in (starting at 1)

If the column is found, the function returns:

The style run associated with that column (see the comments above, you get the text, length, colours, and style bits).
The letter at that column (eg. the letter "b")
Which style run it was found in (eg. style 3)

If the column is not found, the function returns nil.

If you call it without a table as the first argument, or a number as the second argument, it raises an error.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (23,120 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #1 on Thu 19 Apr 2007 01:46 AM (UTC)

Message

As an extension to this idea, we might need to find what column a particular word is in. This would be the first step to identifying the colour.

In this example, I use a trigger script to find the position of the word "bleeding" in a triggered line. Then we use GetStyle to find the colour of that word.


function my_trigger (name, line, wildcards, styles)
 
  -- find location of word
  col = string.find (line, "bleeding")
  if not col then
    return
  end -- word not found

  -- get style at that location
  style = GetStyle (styles, col)

  -- display it
  print ("word is in", RGBColourToName (style.textcolour))
 
end -- function my_trigger

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (23,120 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #2 on Sat 21 Apr 2007 05:51 AM (UTC)

Message

The GetStyle function is now incorporated in the file getstyle.lua which ships with MUSHclient 4.05 onwards.

So, to find a style you now just need to "require" it, like this:


require "getstyle"

style = GetStyle (styles, col)  -- find style for column "col" in "styles"

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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