Old School Recipes for Output

By Oscar Merida

The Spacetraders client uses a strongly typed object to parse API responses. However, as it’s grown in functionality, the user experience—especially the output–has become increasingly cumbersome. We added a basic help command, but the output of our commands still leaves much to be desired. Scrolling through endless lines of raw dumps of complex objects isn’t just tedious-it’s inefficient. Let’s address the UX and make our tool a pleasure to use. We’ll show how PHP’s string manipulation capabilities can render clean, readable, and even color-coded output. From sprintf() to venerable ANSI escape codes, let’s dive into some old-school functions to polish our output. by Oscar Merida

This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue of PHP Architect magazine. To read the complete article please subscribe or purchase the complete issue.

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