Menu get cluttered when wide characters are used

[keatonLiu]

Version

0.6.4

Operating System

Windows

Environment

Any wide characters like “菜单” is used in the string item of the menu.

What happened?

The wide character takes up two spaces, but the program thinks it is only one character long.

[pmbarrett314]

Hmm. Do you have a full example you could share?

[keatonLiu]

from cursesmenu import CursesMenu
from cursesmenu.items import MenuItem

menu = CursesMenu("Title", "Subtitle")
item1 = MenuItem("这是一个中文菜单项", menu)
item2 = MenuItem("这是第二个中文菜单项", menu)
menu.append_item(item1)
menu.append_item(item2)
# Create some items
menu.start()
menu.join()
# Finally, we call show to show the menu and allow the user to interact
menu.show()

[keatonLiu]

Only when I use all English characters will it display normally

[pmbarrett314]

Currently I can only reproduce this in Windows in the pycharm console. Works fine in mac pycharm and mac terminal, and windows cmd and powershell won't even display the non-english characters. I'll have to investigate what windows pycharm terminal is doing differently that might cause that.

[keatonLiu]

This problem does not only appear in pycharm.
This is the situation displayed in the default cmd of win11. It seems that Chinese characters are outputed as one character length, and the characters are all squeezed together.

It is another situation in win11 terminal application. It seems that Chinese characters are regarded as one character length, but in fact they are two characters long.

[pmbarrett314]

MIght be related to zephyrproject-rtos/windows-curses/issues/3.

Cursesmenu isn't doing anything that looks at the width of an individual string or character in a string.

When it draws an item it just adds the string to the appropriate spot, the addstr function in curses just needs a starting point. So this is either something to do with the way that particular terminal is handling wide characters or something in windows-curses.

I set my system to chinese and tried to run this example in various terminals. If I change the font in cmd, terminal, and powershell the example actually works fine on my machine.

If you have WSL on your machine, you could try it in that. I'll look around at some other possibilities of working around this issue.

[keatonLiu]

During the test, I also found a small problem. I don’t know if you have this problem. In the above sample program, when selecting the exit item, you need to press Enter twice. When I exited for the first time, an error report flashed by. After I took a screen recording, I found that the error report was 'stty' is not recognized as an internal or external command

[keatonLiu]

MIght be related to zephyrproject-rtos/windows-curses/issues/3.

Cursesmenu isn't doing anything that looks at the width of an individual string or character in a string.

When it draws an item it just adds the string to the appropriate spot, the addstr function in curses just needs a starting point. So this is either something to do with the way that particular terminal is handling wide characters or something in windows-curses.

I set my system to chinese and tried to run this example in various terminals. If I change the font in cmd, terminal, and powershell the example actually works fine on my machine.

If you have WSL on your machine, you could try it in that. I'll look around at some other possibilities of working around this issue.

I feel that there is a high probability that it is a problem with windows-curses

[pmbarrett314]

I did have it directly calling stty as part of the curses cleanup, I've added a check for that, so that error should be gone at least.

I agree that it's likely a windows-cursss issue. If I find the time I'll definitely try to keep digging and see if I can find a workaround, but it will likely just depend on a fix from them.

[ogios]

i only found one way to avoid it, which is to test every software i know 😂, The outputs from each software are different.
here's a software called 'tabby', it works fine with Chinese, just one small issue, when it prints out full width characters, the border line behind that character would be replaced by something i don't know.