Old School Recipes for Output

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.