ascii-art

A command-line program written in Go that takes a string as input and outputs it as large ASCII art characters using pre-made banner files.

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How It Works

Each character in the input is looked up in a banner file where every printable ASCII character is pre-drawn across exactly 8 lines. The program prints all characters side by side, row by row, to produce the final ASCII art output.

Example:

go run main.go "Hello"

 _    _          _   _          
| |  | |        | | | |         
| |__| |   ___  | | | |   ___   
|  __  |  / _ \ | | | |  / _ \  
| |  | | |  __/ | | | | | (_) | 
|_|  |_|  \___| |_| |_|  \___/  

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Usage

go run main.go "<your text>"

Examples

go run main.go "Hello"
go run main.go "Hello There"
go run main.go "Hello\nThere"
go run main.go "Hello\n\nThere"
go run main.go "123"
go run main.go "{Hello There}"
go run main.go ""

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Supported Input

Input type	Example	Behaviour
Uppercase letters	"HELLO"	Drawn in large ASCII art
Lowercase letters	"hello"	Drawn in large ASCII art
Numbers	"123"	Drawn in large ASCII art
Spaces	"Hello There"	Space character has an 8-line drawing
Special characters	"{!@#}"	All printable ASCII characters work
\n	"Hello\nThere"	Starts a new block of ASCII art
\n\n	"Hello\n\nThere"	Empty line between two blocks
Empty string	""	Prints nothing

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Banner Files

The project includes three banner styles. The program uses standard by default.

File	Style description
standard.txt	Clean block letters
shadow.txt	Characters with a shadow style
thinkertoy.txt	Rounded playful style

Each banner file contains every printable ASCII character from space to ~, drawn across exactly 8 lines and separated by blank lines. All three files have 855 lines total.

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Project Structure

ascii-art/
├── go.mod
├── main.go          ← core program logic
├── main_test.go     ← unit tests
├── standard.txt     ← standard banner file
├── shadow.txt       ← shadow banner file
└── thinkertoy.txt   ← thinkertoy banner file

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How the Character Lookup Works

Every character in the banner file has a fixed position calculated by this formula:

startIndex = (asciiValue - 32) * 9 + 1

• asciiValue - 32 — space is ASCII 32 and is the first character in the file, so we offset from it
• * 9 — each character occupies 9 lines (8 drawing lines + 1 blank separator)
• + 1 — Go slices are zero-indexed so we adjust by 1

The program reads exactly 8 lines from that position to get the full character drawing.

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Running Tests

go test ./...

Expected output when all tests pass:

ok      ascii-art       0.002s

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Requirements

• Go 1.16 or higher
• Standard Go packages only — no external dependencies

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Packages Used

• fmt — printing output
• os — reading files and command-line arguments
• strings — splitting strings and building output

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Authors

-Divine Ameh (diameh) -Victor Ameh (vameh) -Oluwatofunmi Osifowora (oosifowo)