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Four small text utilities under one distribution — English plurals and ordinals, terminal-aware wrapping and column widths, and the variation selectors that decide whether a glyph is drawn as emoji.

Version

0.0.13 zef:japhb

Depends

Terminal::ANSIColor

License

Artistic-2.0

Its own test suite

4 files, green

Checked

2026-09-14 against Raku++ 3.28.0 and Rakudo 2026.08

Where it lives

raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install Text::MiscUtils

zef install Text::MiscUtils writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

These are the functions you write badly, in a hurry, at the bottom of a script: the one that decides between "1 file" and "2 files", the one that turns 22 into "22nd", the one that wraps a paragraph to the terminal without cutting a CJK character in half. Each is a few lines and each has an edge case — 11 is not "11st", and a wide character is not one column — so having them written once and tested is worth more than the line count suggests.

The distribution is a namespace rather than a single module: ::English, ::Layout and ::Emojify are separate units, imported separately.

English, and layout #

::English is two subs. _s gives the plural suffix for a count, taking the suffix pair as optional arguments when "s" is not the right one, and ordinal gets the teens right:

use Text::MiscUtils::English;

say (1, 2, 3, 11, 22).map({ ordinal($_) }).join(' ');

for 0, 1, 2 -> $n { say "$n file{_s($n)}" }
say '3 bo', _s(3, 'xes', 'x');

1st 2nd 3rd 11th 22nd
0 files
1 file
2 files
3 boxes

::Layout measures and wraps in columns rather than characters, so it agrees with what a terminal will actually draw:

use Text::MiscUtils::Layout;

say '[' ~ $_ ~ ']' for wrap-text(24, 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog');
say duospace-width('hello 世界'), ' columns, ', 'hello 世界'.chars, ' characters';

[The quick brown fox     ]
[jumps over the lazy dog ]
10 columns, 8 characters

The brackets are there to show something the fence would otherwise hide: wrap-text returns a list of lines each padded out to the full width, not trimmed. That is what you want when the block is going into a column beside another one, and a surprise if you were expecting bare text — pass :!fill-trailing to wrap-text's sibling text-wrap when you want it off.

::Emojify is the smallest of the three: emojify appends U+FE0F to a character so a dual-presentation glyph is drawn in colour, and textify appends U+FE0E so it is drawn as text.

The one thing to know #

use Text::MiscUtils; imports nothing at all. The top-level unit exists to hold the namespace and exports no subs, so the natural first line gets you a clean compile and then Undefined routine 'ordinal' at the point of use — the same message on both engines, which is at least an unambiguous one.

Import the unit you want by name: use Text::MiscUtils::English;, use Text::MiscUtils::Layout;, use Text::MiscUtils::Emojify;. There is no single import that brings in all three.