Fancy Input

A terminal-based python input tool for asking users with several options and except their input.

Install

To install this package, type following command in your terminal

pip install fancyInput

Usage

The input is basically formed with Option and OptionGroup. To Create a series of Options, you need to

from fancyInput import NumberOption

options = [
    NumberOption("opt1"),
    NumberOption("opt2"),
    NumberOption("opt3")
]

this code create a list of NumberOption, which serve the numbers as input. Then you need put these option into a OptionGroup like follows:

from fancyInput import HorizontalOptionGroup, NumberOption
options = [
    NumberOption("opt1"),
    NumberOption("opt2"),
    NumberOption("opt3")
]

hop = HorizontalOptionGroup(
	"choose your options"
    *options
)

The OptionGroup will automatically assign the numbers to every NumberOption. Once init is done, you can call ask() method to get user input

selectedOpt = hop.ask()

It returns an Option instance, you can get its option label, option content by access its properties

# if user selected the second NumberOption, the printed
# result should be:
# 	1
# 	opt2

print(selectedOpt.opt) 
print(selectedOpt.name)

Example

HorizontalOptionGroup

The HorizontalOptionGroup will output a group with horizontal listed options like following:

To output like this, you can do

from fancyInput import HorizontalOptionGroup, NumberOption

gr = HorizontalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        NumberOption("porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setMaxOptionPerUnit(4)
gr.ask()

The method setMaxOptionPerUnit() is to set maximum number of options in a single line. For the default situation, this value is 3.

VerticalOptionGroup

The VerticalOptionGroup will output a group with Vertical listed options like following:

To output like this, you should do

from fancyInput import VerticalOptionGroup, NumberOption

gr = VerticalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        NumberOption("porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setMaxOptionPerUnit(4)
gr.ask()

The method setMaxOptionPerUnit() is to set maximum number of options in a single Column. For the default situation, this value is 3.

In the VerticalOptionGroup, you can manually adjust the width of question box by:

from fancyInput import VerticalOptionGroup, NumberOption

gr = VerticalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        NumberOption("porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setMaxLengthOfQuestion(15)
gr.ask()

This will output a layout like this:

Default Selection

Both VerticalOptionGroup and HorizontalOptionGroup support setting a certain option as the default selection. To enable this feature, you should do:

from fancyInput import VerticalOptionGroup, NumberOption

gr = VerticalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        NumberOption("porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setDefaultOption(0)
gr.setMaxLengthOfQuestion(15)
gr.ask()

In this way, the Option with the index 0 will be the default selection. Once user directly input enter without anything, this default option will be selected.

What you need to pay attention is that the index is the order of Option in the constructor, not the option number displayed on every option. If you mixed use NumberOption and AsciiOption, this may bring some cofusions. You can also putting a reference of Option to assgin the default selection like this:

from fancyInput import VerticalOptionGroup, NumberOption

defaultOption = NumberOption("porridge")
gr = VerticalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        defaultOption,
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setDefaultOption(defaultOption)
gr.setMaxLengthOfQuestion(15)
gr.ask()

Mix Use of Option

We designed Two type of Options: NumberOption and AsciiOption. You can create a OptionGroup with AsciiOption by

from fancyInput import HorizontalOptionGroup, AsciiOption, NumberOption

gr = HorizontalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        AsciiOption("A","roasted beef"),
        AsciiOption("B","porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setMaxOptionPerUnit(4)
gr.ask()

This will looks like:

You can find that the last two NumberOption is labeled with 2 and 3, not 0 and 1.

User Input Behavior

We explain the user input behavior with following example:

from fancyInput import HorizontalOptionGroup, NumberOption

gr = HorizontalOptionGroup(
        "What receipe do you want for today's dinner?",
        NumberOption("roasted beef"),
        NumberOption("porridge"),
        NumberOption("barbecue"),
        NumberOption("fruit salad"),
    )
gr.setMaxOptionPerUnit(4)
gr.ask()

In this example, no default selection is assigned. If User input a number not belonging to the options listed here, the input would be erased and user is asked to re-input. Once user input a valid option, the instance of that option will be returned, and the console would highlight user's selection:

License

MIT © MintCoffeeCat