Scrollable chatbox/log box

[Jackieryder]

I'm trying to code a scrollable chatbox which include the up arrow, down arrow, and obviously a scroll inbetween the 2 to scroll the chat. Let put the detail of how I'm going to set up it aside, I'm running into a few problem on how to render the text and doing text wrap to new line.

So far I have in mind is that:

Pseudo code:

class LogMessage
public LogMessage(string msg)
{
CutMessageIntoABunchOfListBasedOnMaximumLength() // this will cut the log message into individual smaller string which is just long enough to fit in a text of the same width.
}

Draw(); // draw all the string in the list of string

I'm not so sure how to code the CutMessageIntoABunchOfListBasedOnMaximumLength at all

is there a specific way to get the amount of character in a string given a font and charactersize and the width?

THis is the first time I ever tried to recreate a scroll chatbox so my structure might be terribly bad, if you have any suggestion on how to code this, please do so

Thank you

[dabbertorres]

The '\n' character works fine with sf::Text's. Try it, see how it works for you!

(That's what I did for my in-window terminal)

[eXpl0it3r]

You'll have to check the text for it's length and break when it's too long. Quite a bit of a tedious task, but you could look at how SFGUI does it.

[Jackieryder]

I don't think the SFGUI isn't what I was looking for. I just wanted to be able to create a text field given the width and height, then as I type in any string, it will be wrapped according to the width of the text field.

Musn't there be any other way?

EDIT:

im using SFML.net version and notice that there is a FindCharacterPos(uint index) which apparently return a vector2f of the character at that index. Is there a way to reverse doing this? Like FindPositionCharacter(vector2f loc) which return the index of the character instead

Edit 2:

I guess I could just loop through the string (start at the index 0 of the string) and loop through, add 1 to the i everytime if the FindCharacterPos.X is less than the length. and if it is bigger than the length I could create a new string based off the substring (the index, string.length)

That would work but Imo that is a terrible way of doing it. But since I don't have any other way so while im waiting for a reply im going to test it out

[dabbertorres]

Why would that be terrible? It sounds valid to me.

[Jackieryder]

Why would that be terrible? It sounds valid to me.

I thought because of the longer the length of the message, the longer it would take to divide it into boxes

But nevermind I was wrong, it work perfectly. What i thought is illogical since no matter what method you use the longer the message the more box is needed to  be generated lol.

Yeah nevermind