ASCII Art Printer

This Go program reads a text input and prints its ASCII art representation using a predefined set of ASCII characters stored in a file named standard.txt.

Features

• Converts text input to ASCII art
• Supports newline characters (\n)
• Handles missing characters with an error message

Prerequisites

• Go installed on your machine

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Hilary-code/ascii-art.git

2. Navigate to the project directory:

   cd ascii-art

Usage

Run the program with a text input as a command-line argument:

go run .  "Hello, World!" | cat -e

Example

go run .  "Hello, World!" | cat -e

How It Works

1. Input Parsing:

   • The program takes a text input from the command-line arguments using os.Args[1].
   • The input may contain newline characters (\n), which are replaced with actual newline characters using strings.ReplaceAll.

2. ASCII Art Mapping:

   • The Banner function reads a file named standard.txt to load predefined ASCII art characters.
   • It splits the file content into lines and maps each character to its corresponding ASCII art representation.

3. Text to ASCII Conversion:

   • The PrintAscii function processes each character in the input text.
   • For each character, it looks up its ASCII art representation from the map created by the Banner function.
   • The ASCII art lines for each character are collected in a 2D slice (Output).

4. Printing ASCII Art:

   • Finally, the Output slice is printed to the console, displaying the input text as ASCII art.

Example:

For the input text "Hello\nWorld", the program will:

1. Replace \n with actual newline characters.
2. Split the text into lines: ["Hello", "World"].
3. Look up each character's ASCII art representation from standard.txt.
4. Print the ASCII art representation of each character to the console, maintaining the line structure.

 _    _          _   _          
| |  | |        | | | |         
| |__| |   ___  | | | |   ___   
|  __  |  / _ \ | | | |  / _ \  
| |  | | |  __/ | | | | | (_) | 
|_|  |_|  \___| |_| |_|  \___/  
                                
                                
__          __                 _       _  
\ \        / /                | |     | | 
 \ \  /\  / /    ___    _ __  | |   __| | 
  \ \/  \/ /    / _ \  | '__| | |  / _` | 
   \  /\  /    | (_) | | |    | | | (_| | 
    \/  \/      \___/  |_|    |_|  \__,_| 
                                          

                                                                        

Custom Banner Characters

You can provide a custom banner file to use for printing. The file should contain characters represented as ASCII art with each character separated by newline characters. The program reads 8 lines for each character.

To use a custom banner file, execute the following command:

go run . "Your text" "customBannerFileName"

Replace customBannerFileName with the name of your custom banner file without the ./ and .txt .

File Structure

• main.go: Main source code file
• standard.txt: File containing ASCII art characters
• shadow.txt : File containing ASCII art characters
• thinkertoy.txt : File containing ASCII art characters
• Banner folder : contains the LoadBanner, PrintBanner, RemoveSpecialcase and filecheck functions

Contributing

Feel free to contribute to this project. Create a pull request with your changes, or open an issue if you find any bugs or have suggestions.