Cakephp CakePHP 1.x

Currently, the Shell class has some odd behaviors. There is a Shell::hr() method to create a horizontal rule, but it is hard coded with a static number of hyphen characters. Aside from this, if indentation is used to separate terms from their definitions (i.e.: cake acl help), currently it is up to the developer to hard code the line breaks and continuing indentations. I found this tedious and implemented changes to my own shell by overriding the hr() and out() methods. I thought I would share the code and see if it is something that the CakePHP developers may be interested in. To work properly, a convention should be followed (as I'm using string functions rather than REGEX to do the string manipulation). Those conventions simply are to not worry about newline indentation within the same string sent to a shell's $this->out method. If the first line has indentation, any newlines in the same string will continue to have the same indentation automatically.

Example of currently formatted output (notice the "help" command description):

    help
            Shows this help message.                <-- 2 tabs Nunc mollis v
estibulum varius. Integer sodales mattis mauris lobortis pulvinar amet

Adjusted using my overloaded method:

   help
      Shows this help message.      <-- 2 tabs Nunc mollis
      vestibulum varius. Integer sodales mattis mauris lobortis
      pulvinar amet

The overloaded methods:

 /**

 * Outputs to the stdout filehandle.
 *
 * @param string $string String to output.
 * @param boolean $newline If true, the outputs gets an added newline.
 * @access public
 */
function out($string, $newline = true){
    if(!$this->silent){
        //convert the array to a single string
        if(is_array($string)){
            $str = '';
            foreach ($string as $message) {
                $str .= $message ."\n";
            }
            $string = $str;
        }
        //if smart wrapping is enabled (default), modify our content
        if($this->smartWrap && $string !== ''){
            $matches = null;
            preg_match('/(^(\n*?)(\t*))[^\t].*/s', $string, $matches);
            $indentMultiplier = strlen($matches[3]);    //the found tabs
            $indent = $indentMultiplier * $this->spacesForTabs;
            $indentText = str_repeat(' ', $indent);
            $string = str_replace("\t", str_repeat(' ', $this->spacesForTabs), $string);
            $string = str_replace("\n", "\n".$indentText, $string);
            $string = wordwrap(ltrim($string), $this->lineLength - $indent, "\n$indentText");
            $string = $indentText.$string;
        }
        return $this->Dispatch->stdout($string, $newline);
    }
    return false;
}</code>

/**
 * Outputs a series of minus characters to the standard output, acts as a visual separator.
 *
 * @param boolean $newline If true, the outputs gets an added newline.
 * @access public
 */
function hr($newline = false){
    if ($newline) {
        $this->out("\n");
    }
    $this->out(str_repeat('-', $this->lineLength));
    if ($newline){
        $this->out("\n");
    }
}

New necessary properties to the class for configuration:

var $silent = false;
var $smartWrap = true;
var $spacesForTabs = 3;
var $lineLength = 63;

If this is something CakePHP developers would be interested in, I can supply a patch to /cake/console/libs/shell.php as well as all of the other shells/tasks to properly align with the convention of my modified Shell::out() method...or if any change requests are required I could work on that as well. I think this would severely assist with the readability of some of the shells (ACL comes to mind).