/ 
Text-Table-Tiny-1.03
River stage two • 10 direct dependents • 24 total dependents
/ Text::Table::Tiny

NAME

Text::Table::Tiny - generate simple text tables from 2D arrays

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Table::Tiny 1.02 qw/ generate_table /;

my $rows = [
  [qw/ Pokemon     Type     Count /],
  [qw/ Abra        Psychic      5 /],
  [qw/ Ekans       Poison     123 /],
  [qw/ Feraligatr  Water     5678 /],
];

print generate_table(rows => $rows, header_row => 1), "\n";

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a single function, generate_table, which formats a two-dimensional array of data as a text table. It handles text that includes ANSI escape codes and wide Unicode characters.

There are a number of options for adjusting the output format, but the intention is that the default option is good enough for most uses.

The example shown in the SYNOPSIS generates the following table:

+------------+---------+-------+
| Pokemon    | Type    | Count |
+------------+---------+-------+
| Abra       | Psychic | 5     |
| Ekans      | Poison  | 123   |
| Feraligatr | Water   | 5678  |
+------------+---------+-------+

Support for wide characters was added in 1.02, so if you need that, you should specify that as your minimum required version, as per the SYNOPSIS.

The interface changed with version 0.04, so if you use the generate_table() function illustrated above, then you need to require at least version 0.04 of this module.

Some of the options described below were added in version 1.00, so your best bet is to require at least version 1.00.

generate_table()

The generate_table function understands a number of arguments, which are passed as a hash. The only required argument is rows. Where arguments were not supported in the original release, the first supporting version is noted.

If you pass an unknown argument, generate_table will die with an error message.

  • rows

    Takes an array reference which should contain one or more rows of data, where each row is an array reference.

  • header_row

    If given a true value, the first row in the data will be interpreted as a header row, and separated from the rest of the table with a ruled line.

  • header

    Takes an array reference which has the header row to use for the table. You can't use this option together with header_row.

    Added in 1.03

  • separate_rows

    If given a true value, a separator line will be drawn between every row in the table, and a thicker line will be used for the header separator.

  • top_and_tail

    If given a true value, then the top and bottom border lines will be skipped. This reduces the vertical height of the generated table.

    Added in 0.04.

  • align

    This takes an array ref with one entry per column, to specify the alignment of that column. Legal values are 'l', 'c', and 'r'. You can also specify a single alignment for all columns. ANSI escape codes are handled.

    Added in 1.00.

  • style

    Specifies the format of the output table. The default is 'classic', but other options are 'boxrule' and 'norule'.

    If you use the boxrule style, you'll probably need to run binmode(STDOUT, ':utf8').

    Added in 1.00.

  • indent

    Specify an indent that should be prefixed to every line of the generated table. This can either be a string of spaces, or an integer giving the number of spaces wanted.

    Added in 1.00.

  • compact

    If set to a true value then we omit the single space padding on either side of every column.

    Added in 1.00.

EXAMPLES

If you just pass the data and no other options:

generate_table(rows => $rows);

You get minimal ruling:

+------------+---------+-------+
| Pokemon    | Type    | Count |
| Abra       | Psychic | 5     |
| Ekans      | Poison  | 123   |
| Feraligatr | Water   | 5678  |
+------------+---------+-------+

If you want a separate header, set the header_row option to a true value, as shown in the SYNOPSIS.

To take up fewer lines, you can miss out the top and bottom rules, by setting top_and_tail to a true value:

generate_table(rows => $rows, header_row => 1, top_and_tail => 1);

This will generate the following:

| Pokemon    | Type    | Count |
+------------+---------+-------+
| Abra       | Psychic | 5     |
| Ekans      | Poison  | 123   |
| Feraligatr | Water   | 5678  |

If you want a more stylish looking table, set the style parameter to 'boxrule':

binmode(STDOUT,':utf8');
generate_table(rows => $rows, header_row => 1, style => 'boxrule');

This uses the ANSI box rule characters. Note that you will need to ensure UTF output.

┌────────────┬─────────┬───────┐
│ Pokemon    │ Type    │ Count │
├────────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ Abra       │ Psychic │ 5     │
│ Ekans      │ Poison  │ 123   │
│ Feraligatr │ Water   │ 5678  │
└────────────┴─────────┴───────┘

You might want to right-align numeric values:

generate_table( ... , align => [qw/ l l r /] );

The align parameter can either take an arrayref, or a string with an alignment to apply to all columns:

┌────────────┬─────────┬───────┐
│ Pokemon    │ Type    │ Count │
├────────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ Abra       │ Psychic │     5 │
│ Ekans      │ Poison  │   123 │
│ Feraligatr │ Water   │  5678 │
└────────────┴─────────┴───────┘

If you're using the boxrule style, you might feel you can remove the padding on either side of every column, done by setting compact to a true value:

┌──────────┬───────┬─────┐
│Pokemon   │Type   │Count│
├──────────┼───────┼─────┤
│Abra      │Psychic│    5│
│Ekans     │Poison │  123│
│Feraligatr│Water  │ 5678│
└──────────┴───────┴─────┘

You can also ask for a rule between each row, in which case the header rule becomes stronger. This works best when combined with the boxrule style:

generate_table( ... , separate_rows => 1 );

Which results in the following:

┌────────────┬─────────┬───────┐
│ Pokemon    │ Type    │ Count │
╞════════════╪═════════╪═══════╡
│ Abra       │ Psychic │     5 │
├────────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ Ekans      │ Poison  │   123 │
├────────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ Feraligatr │ Water   │  5678 │
└────────────┴─────────┴───────┘

You can use this with the other styles, but I'm not sure you'd want to.

If you just want columnar output, use the norule style:

generate_table( ... , style => 'norule' );

which results in:

Pokemon      Type      Count

Abra         Psychic       5
Ekans        Poison      123
Feraligatr   Water      5678

Note that everywhere you saw a line on the previous tables, there will be a space character in this version. So you may want to combine the top_and_tail option, to suppress the extra blank lines before and after the body of the table.

SEE ALSO

My blog post where I described changes to formatting; this has more examples.

There are many modules for formatting text tables on CPAN. A good number of them are listed in the See Also section of the documentation for Text::Table::Manifold.

REPOSITORY

https://github.com/neilb/Text-Table-Tiny

AUTHOR

Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>

The original version was written by Creighton Higgins <chiggins@chiggins.com>, but the module was entirely rewritten for 0.05_01.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2020 by Neil Bowers.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.