Border an array of words in BASH-CodePudding

I've been learning Bash and my teacher made an exercise that got me puzzled.

I'm just struggling with adding the spaces in front of the words.

The code should account for the number of characters in each word and adjust the number of asterisks and spacing for it to always be aligned.

This is what it should look like:

***********
* Hello   *
* World   *
* good    *
* etceter *
***********

My code:

#determine biggest word
words=("Hello" "World" "good" "etceter")
numchar=0
for i in ${words[@]}; do
    if [ ${#i} -gt $numchar ]
    then
        numchar=${#i}
    fi
done

#write *
a=-4
while [ $a -lt $numchar ]; do
    printf "*"
    ((a  ))
done

#write array
echo
for txt in ${words[@]}; do
    space=$(($numchar-${#txt}))
    s=0
    echo "* $txt "
    while [ $s -lt $space ]; do
        printf " "
        ((s  ))
        printf "*"
    done
done

#write *
a=-4
while [ $a -lt $numchar ]; do
    printf "*"
    ((a  ))
done

I'm struggling with the #write array part.

Many thanks in advance!

CodePudding user response：

You only need a few changes.

#write array
echo
for txt in ${words[@]}; do
    space=$(($numchar-${#txt}))
    s=0
    echo -n "* $txt "           # -n added to not append a newline
    while [ $s -lt $space ]; do
        echo -n " "             # switched from printf to echo (cosmetics)
        ((s  ))
        # printf "*"            # commented out
    done
    echo "*"                    # added
done

Your while loop only adds the spaces after the current word. The trailing * comes after the loop to finish this line.

CodePudding user response：

Rewriting the last 3 sections:

# define solid string of asterisks

printf -v stars  '*%.0s' $(seq 1 $(( numchar   4)) )    # length = numchar   4

echo "${stars}"

for txt in "${words[@]}"
do
    printf "* %-*s *\n" "${numchar}" "${txt}"
done

echo "${stars}"

This generates:

***********
* Hello   *
* World   *
* good    *
* etceter *
***********