README.md

FancyFormat

A simple library to translate message formats like Minecraft legacy formatting codes, Minecraft JSON text format or Discord Markdown. The two main goals of this project are performance and lossless translation. Sadly, the latter is not always possible since different message formats have different visualization features.

To allow applications to use this library for logging a new format is introduced: The Turtle Format - A simple, easy to expand JSON-based format that supports all features that are available in one or more other supported formats. This new format can be used to store messages without sacrificing information (by storing text in only one format) or using too much disk space (by storing text in all formats).

⚠️ Work in progress ⚠️

This project is still in development and does not have a stable release yet.

Until then, you can use an alpha version. But be advised, it is an alpha.

How it's done

To translate one message format to another, the given message & format are used to create an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), a data structure that can be used for syntax analysis. This is an easy way to handle messages in-memory. Each node of the AST holds some information about the formatting of its children or is a raw text element. This makes nested formatting possible and easy to interpret / parse.

So, in less fancy words, a message is converted into some data structure, which can then be used to translate the initial format to some other format with minimal loss of information.

Example

Let's say we have this message from Discord:

The raw content of that message looks like this:

Hey <@916094119758139413>, look at _this cool **formatting!**_

Regardless of what format we want to translate this message to, we first need to create the message AST. Here's a simple visualization of the implementation:

Ok, so we now can display this message in any supported format. Like, for example, the Minecraft JSON format:

[
  {
    "text": "Hey "
  },
  {
    "text":  "@TurtleBot",
    "color": "aqua"
  },
  {
    "text": ", look at "
  },
  {
    "text": "this cool ",
    "italic": true
  },
  {
    "text": "formatting!",
    "bold": true,
    "italic": true
  }
]

Or alternatively the legacy formatting codes:

Hey §b@TurtleBot§r, look at §othis cool §lformatting!

Both of which would look like this in-game: