In sckott/cowsay: Messages, Warnings, Strings with Ascii Animals

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  comment = "#>",
  collapse = TRUE
)

cowsay makes it easy to print messages, warnings, or character strings with various animals and other creatures.

Installation

Stable version from CRAN

install.packages("cowsay")

or dev version from GitHub

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("sckott/cowsay")

library(cowsay)

The animals

The animals, and other ascii creatures, are all in a single named character vector that is exported from the package. Thus, you can access each animal yourself, and do whatever you want with it.

As of this writing, there are r length(animals) animals.

The names of the animals:

sort(names(animals))

For example, access the cow

cow <- animals[['cow']]
cat(cow)

Say something

We expose the function say() in this package, which you can use to envoke any animal in the package, and make it say whatever you want. Some examples:

say("why did the chicken cross the road", "chicken")

say("boo!", "ghost")

say("nope, don't do that", type = "warning")

There's the special time, that will print out the time

say('time')

It's how you say it

You can use say() and give back a string, message, or warning

Message

say("hello world", by = "cow")

Warning

say("hello world", by = "cow", type = "warning")

String

say("hello world", by = "cow", type = "string")

Add color

library(jsonlite)
library(multicolor)

We rely on the crayon package for color and the multicolor package for multiple colors. The arguments you supply to what_color and by_color can be strings -- either the color name or a hex value -- or a function of class crayon.

say(what = "fortune",
    by = "rabbit",
    what_color = "#FF4500",
    by_color = "red")

colors() are all supported as are any rgb values that evaluate to a string. Supplying multiple colors for what_color or by_color is allowed, as long as they're in a character vector. "rainbow" is also allowed.

# make a vector of animals safe to use on windows in case vignette built on windows
not_on_windows <- c('shortcat','longcat','fish','signbunny','stretchycat',
  'anxiouscat','longtailcat','grumpycat','mushroom')
names_safe <- names(animals)[!names(animals) %in% not_on_windows]

say(what = "fortune", 
    by = sample(names_safe, 1),
    what_color = rgb(.1, .2, .3),
    by_color = sample(colors(), 5),
    type = "message")

say(what = "fortune", 
    by = sample(names_safe, 1),
    what_color = rgb(.1, .2, .3),
    by_color = sample(colors(), 5),
    type = "message")

"rainbow" is the same as c("red", "orange", "yellow", "green", "blue", "purple"). Saves you a bit of typing.

say(what = "foobar",
    by = "shark",
    what_color = "rainbow",
    by_color = c("rainbow", "rainbow", "rainbow"))

The main advantage of using crayon functions instead of color strings is the ability to combine styles together.

library(crayon)

say(what = "fortune",
    by = "egret",
    what_color = bgBlue$white$italic,
    by_color = bold$green)

sckott/cowsay documentation built on Nov. 6, 2023, 1:54 p.m.