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One sub that folds a string to a width — paragraphs kept apart, a prefix per line if you want one, and long words either left whole or cut — for text that is going to a terminal or a plain-text file.

Version

0.0.5 zef:jkramer

Depends

nothing outside the core

License

Artistic-2.0

Its own test suite

5 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::Wrap

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

What it is for #

A help text, a commit message, an email body: prose that has to fit in eighty columns and was written as one long line. Folding it is a loop over words with a running count, plus the two cases everyone forgets — a blank line between paragraphs that must survive, and a word longer than the width. This distribution is that loop with both cases handled, as a single sub with keyword options, and four distributions use it rather than carrying their own.

Folding #

use Text::Wrap;

my $t = 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and keeps running far away from the farm';
say wrap-text($t, :width(32));
say wrap-text($t, :width(32), :prefix('> '));
say wrap-text("first paragraph here\n\nsecond one", :width(12));
say wrap-text('supercalifragilisticexpialidocious word', :width(10), :hard-wrap);

The quick brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog and keeps running
far away from the farm
> The quick brown fox jumps over
> the lazy dog and keeps running
> far away from the farm
first
paragraph
here

second one
supercalif
ragilistic
expialidoc
ious word

The default width is 80. A blank line in the input ends a paragraph and is kept; the regex that decides what a paragraph break looks like is the :paragraph option, for input that separates them some other way. A :prefix goes on every line, a :postfix at every line's end.

The one thing to know #

The prefix is not counted. The three > lines above break in exactly the same places as the three without, so each is two characters wider than the width you asked for — 32 becomes 34 on the screen. When the width is a real limit (a terminal, a mail transport's line length), subtract the prefix from it yourself.

And a word longer than the width is left whole unless :hard-wrap is on: the default keeps words intact and lets the line overflow, which is right for a URL and wrong for a table cell. :hard-wrap cuts at the width, as the last four lines show, with no hyphen and no regard for syllables.