Node Pad is a simple and elegant function to pad strings in both left and right directions. It is written in Typescript and it support both CommonJS and ESM.

The API is quite simple:

import pad from "pad";
// Or const pad = require("pad")
pad("pad", 5); // "pad  "
pad(5, "pad"); // "  pad"
pad("pad", 5, "+"); // "pad++"
pad(5, "pad", "+"); // "++pad"

For TypeScript users, the type definition files are located in "./lib/index.d.ts" and declared inside the "package.json" file.

Node Pad comes in multiple flavours depending on your target environment:

• CommonJS: dist/pad.cjs.js
  Bundle used by Node.js and compatible with ES5. It is declared inside the package.json by the main property and used by default with require("pad") in a Node.js environment.
• ES module: dist/pad.esm.js
  Bundle using the ECMAScript standard defined in ES6 for working with modules. The path to the ES module is declared inside the package.json by the module property for ESM-aware tools like Rollup and webpack 2+.

The CommonJS syntax to import Node Pad is:

const pad = require("pad/dist/pad.cjs.js");
// Or simply
const pad = require("pad");

While the ES Modules syntax is:

import pad from "pad/dist/pad.esm.js";
// Or for ESM-aware tools
import pad from "pad";

Options are provided as a third argument and are all optional. A string argument it is interpreted as the "char" option. Accepted options include:

• char (string)
  The character used to fill the gap.
• colors (boolean)
  Ajust to hidden terminal color characters, you may also use require 'pad/lib/colors' to avoid passing this option.
• strip (boolean)
  Remove characters from text if length smaller than text length, default to "false".
• fixed_width (boolean)
  An optimization option to disable the usage of the wcwdith package to handle the discovery of characters using more than one column for display. one column to display
• wcwidth_options (object)
  Options passed to the wcwidth package used to calculate the display width of characters using more than one column.

Left padding occurs when the first argument is a number and the second argument is a string.

import pad from "pad";
pad(5, "pad", "-").should.eql("--pad");

Right padding occurs when the first argument is a string and the second argument is a number.

import pad from "pad";
pad("pad", 6).should.eql("pad   ");

Starting with version 1.1.0, Node pad rely on Node.js 4.0.0 or more recent. Stick to version 1.0.x if using an older version of Node.js.

Via npm:

npm install pad

Via git (or downloaded tarball), copy or link the project from a discoverable Node.js directory:

git clone https://github.com/adaltas/node-pad.git

Clone the repo, install the development dependencies and run the suite:

git clone https://github.com/adaltas/node-pad.git .
npm install
make test

The project is sponsored by Adaltas based in Paris, France. Adaltas offers support and consulting on distributed systems, big data and open source.