wyldepointer/cbox

Drawing ASCII boxes in C.

cbox

A piece of code for drawing simple ASCII boxes.

$ ./cbox 30 10
+----------------------------+
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+                            +
+----------------------------+

$ ./cbox 15 5 '~'
+-------------+
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
+-------------+

Usage

Usage: ./cbox <width> <height> [char_to_fill]

Compiling

$ cc -o cbox -Wall -pedantic -std=c89 cbox.c

FAQ

Q) What's the "buffered" version?

A) It's the same code but it stores the characters in a line buffer which is dynamically allocated. The main reason for that version was comparing the performance of (width * height) times of putc() with malloc() + width times of puts which indeed turned out to be slower, since malloc() is a truly expensive call.

Q) How to store the output in a file?

A) $ ./cbox 30 10 > /tmp/my.txt

TODO

• Optimization. (I feel like it should work even faster.)
• Testing on various compilers on various OS / distributions.
• getopt()