Ansible

Overview

Ansible is an attempt at an ANSI-escape to HTML conversion tool that's fast enough to use on large input. Particularly, it's meant to be significantly faster than the ansi-sys gem for large input text.

Installation

Install the gem:

 gem install ansible

Usage

Here's an example of using Ansible in a rails controller:

 require 'ansible'

 class TextController << ApplicationController
   include Ansible
   def show
     rawtext = Text.find(params[:id])
     @text = ansi_escaped(rawtext)
   end
 end

Ansible will convert escapes into HTML <span> tags that apply sensible classes that correspond to ANSI escape directives, like:

• ansible_green
• ansible_blue
• ansible_magenta

You can control the display of these with CSS however you please.

See the sample stylesheet.

Long input

For input beyond a certain size (default 65535 characters), Ansible will automatically fall back to simply stripping escapes entirely. You can control this threshold when you call ansi_escaped:

 class Helper
   include Ansible

   def handle_escaped(rawtext)
     ansi_escaped(h(rawtext), 32768).html_safe
   end
 end

What's with the name Ansible?

An ansible is a fictional faster than light communication device.

Contributing

We welcome fixes and enhancements. Feel free to fork on github and submit a pull request.