TITLE: Curl-able contact card
DATE: 2020-08-08
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


I saw a Github Gist with a businesss card that can be displayed all 
pretty-like in the terminal using curl. The one online was quite 
simplistic, it just padded out the card contents manually with 
spaces, which required a lot of trial and error to position 
everything correctly. It also required knowing the ANSI escape 
sequences to colour and style the text.

I wrote the script below to automate some of this process and 
produce a similar looking contact card:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash

    # Define colours and fonts
    boxcol=""
    default=""
    bold=""
    underline=""
    reverse=""
    black=""
    red=""
    green=""
    yellow=""
    blue=""
    magenta=""
    cyan=""
    white=""

    # Card items, in line order
    inputs=()
    inputs+=("${red}${underline}John L. Godlee")
    inputs+=("${blue}PhD Student, University of Edinburgh")
    inputs+=("")
    inputs+=("${bold}Email: ${default}johngodlee@gmail.com")
    inputs+=("${bold}Blog: ${default}https://johngodlee.github.io")
    inputs+=("${bold}GitHub: 
${default}https://github.com/johngodlee")
    inputs+=("${bold}ORCiD: 
${default}https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5595-255X")
    inputs+=("")
    inputs+=("${yellow}curl -sL 
https://johngodlee.github.io/files/card")

    # Define left-padding
    leftpad='    '

    # Define box drawing chars
    vbord="│"
    hbord="─"
    tlcor="╭"
    trcor="╮"
    brcor="╯"
    blcor="╰"

    # Get length of longest line 
    linel=$(for i in "${inputs[@]}"; do
        echo $i | sed 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g'| wc -c
    done | sort -nr | head -n 1)

    # Get width of card, with padding
    inwidth=$(($linel + 4*2))

    # Get length of left-padding
    leftpadl=${#leftpad}

    # Print top line
    printf "$boxcol"
    printf "$tlcor"
    for ((i=1; i<=inwidth; i++)); do
        printf "$hbord" 
    done
    printf "$trcor"
    printf "\n"
    printf "$boxcol"
    printf "$vbord"
    for ((i=1; i<=inwidth; i++)); do
        printf " " 
    done
    printf "$vbord"
    printf "\n"

    # Print each card item
    for ((i = 0; i < ${#inputs[@]}; i++))
    do
        # Get length of string
        stringcl=$(echo ${inputs[$i]} | sed 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g')
        stringl=${#stringcl}

        # Get length of right padding 
        rightpadl=$(($inwidth-$stringl-$leftpadl))

        # Print border
        printf "$boxcol$vbord" 

        # Print left-padding
        printf "$leftpad"
            
        # Print string
        printf "$default${inputs[$i]}$default"

        # Print right-padding
        for ((j=1; j<=rightpadl; j++))
        do
            printf " "
        done

        # Print border
        printf "$boxcol$vbord"

        # New-line
        printf "\n"
    done

    # Print bottom line
    printf "$boxcol"
    printf "$vbord"
    for ((i=1; i<=inwidth; i++)); do
        printf " " 
    done
    printf "$vbord"
    printf "\n"
    printf "$boxcol$blcor"
    for ((i=1; i<=inwidth; i++)); do
        printf "$hbord" 
    done
    printf "$brcor"
    printf "\n"

The customisation comes from the inputs array, which contains the 
contents of the contact card, and uses the variables for font and 
colour to style the text, e.g.:

    inputs+=("${red}${underline}John L. Godlee")

The script requires bash rather than a standard POSIX shell, 
because it uses bash arithmetic, but this could probably be ported 
to use bc or something. Also not that some of the escape sequences 
might not have rendered properly on the web, like ^[.

  ![Contact card 
screenshot](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/card/card.png)