Inspired by the screenshots in this otherwise unrelated article https://itsfoss.com/tennis-csv-tool/ I'd like to highlight some lines in the terminal output of one of my zsh shell scripts.

Here a simplified version of what I puzzled together (the complete version is at the end of the post):

middeco=$'\n\e[38;5;208;48;5;214m\e[39m\e[38;5;231m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0;38;5;214m\e[0m\e[48;5;X'

file="some text"
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

This works fine for short and long texts, but for medium length texts, the background colour starts to reappear towards the end of the second line (highlighted by the freehand circle in the screenshot).

Is there any way to avoid this?

---

Environment:

• macOS Terminal.app v.2.15
• window width: 96 columns
• zsh v5.9

---

Just for completeness here the complete script including the nerdfont characters:

startdeco=$'\n\e[38;5;202m\e[38;5;231;48;5;202m'
middeco=$'\e[38;5;202;48;5;208m\e[38;5;208;48;5;214m\e[39m\e[38;5;231m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0;38;5;214m\e[0m\e[48;5;X'

file="some text"
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"