{"id":5595,"date":"2022-11-01T00:01:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T07:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=5595"},"modified":"2022-11-12T10:40:04","modified_gmt":"2022-11-12T18:40:04","slug":"output-a-colorful-chessboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=5595","title":{"rendered":"Output a Colorful Chessboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Difficulty: ★ ★ ★ ☆<\/h2>\n

Text mode need not be so dreary when it comes to generating a game of chess. You have several options, all of which stink to varying degrees.
\n
\nThe worst is shown in Figure 1, which is something I concocted in a brutal attempt to create an ugly text mode chessboard. I’m sure some vintage mainframe in the 1970s forced users to endure playing chess on such a thing. Yikes.<\/p>\n

\"text

Figure 1. What could be a potential chess game on a terminal back in 1974.<\/p><\/div>\n

Better is to use color to fashion a light, friendly version of a text mode chessboard. I covered ASNI color text output in a post<\/a> from earlier this year. You could use such techniques to generate output such as shown in Figure 2.<\/p>\n

\"colorful

Figure 1. A better text mode chessboard created with ANSI color output.<\/p><\/div>\n

Your challenge for this month’s Exercise is to write code that generates the chessboard in Figure 2 as output. This task may seem trivial, but the difficultly level rises because the grid shows alternating colors. When you first write your code, you may see a striped pattern, not a grid. Extra decisions are required to output a grid.<\/p>\n

As mentioned earlier, refer to the ANSI color Lessons for details on color output in C. The two codes\/colors I use are defined in my solution as:<\/p>\n

#define COLOR_WHITE \"\\x1b[30;47m\"
\n#define COLOR_CYAN \"\\x1b[30;46m\"<\/code><\/p>\n

Both set black text in the foreground, but white and cyan colors for the background, as lovingly shown in Figure 2.<\/p>\n

Please try this exercise on your own before you check out my solution<\/a>. This code is used in later posts to generate chessboard output for my Knight Moves<\/a> series of lessons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So many computer things involve chess. Why not create a pretty text-mode chessboard? Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exercise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5595"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5637,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions\/5637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}