Displaying a Maze on the Console

Introducing ASCII art

ASCII art is not necessarily the fanciest way, nor the prettiest, but it is often the most convenient way to display our mazes. We nearly always have easy access to a terminal, and we don’t need to worry about bringing out any external libraries or APIs. In short, it’s perfect for what we need just now. Let’s walk through one possible way to approach drawing our mazes using only four different characters: space (“ ”) for cells and passages, pipe (“|”) for vertical walls, hyphen (“-”) for horizontal walls, and plus (“+”) to draw corners. An example of a small maze drawn using these characters is given below:

Note:

Be careful not to think of the lines as the passages in these drawings. The lines are the walls, and the whitespace represents the corridors.

Maze in the terminal

As shown above, we’re going to have each cell share walls with its neighbors. That is to say, the eastern wall of a cell will be the same as the ...