Pylsy: Python library to represent tabular data in ASCII tables | Hacker News Reader

Pylsy: Python library to represent tabular data in ASCII tables

github.com

64 pointsleviathan199524 comments

Isn't that exactly what tabulate has been doing very well for a while? https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tabulate

Note the variety of formats: 'ascii', but also html, latex & co.

Tabulate is also excellent for the command line tool it provides, I use it to convert csv output into tables for GH comments all the time.

PrettyTable is an established library which does the same: https://code.google.com/p/prettytable/

The introduction is almost identical: '[Pylsy/PrettyTable] is a simple Python library designed to make it quick and easy to represent tabular data in visually appealing ASCII tables'

I noticed that too. The copy paste is strong in this one.

I've used PrettyTable for years. I don't see how this improves upon it

Cool!

Sorry for the plug, but this gawk program does something similar:

https://github.com/joepvd/table

Field splitting can be defined with all of (g)awks possibilities. Features different styles, among which unicode table borders.

Nice utility! I've written a quick clone of it in Tcl for use on systems without GNU Awk: http://wiki.tcl.tk/41682.

Aha! That must have been the first time I have tried to read Tcl for more than a minute :) Looks like one can prototype fast in this language. Thanks for writing / posting!

Judging by this thread there are a surprising number of tools dedicated to this. Typically when I need tabular output I stick the data into a Pandas dataframe and its output format is usually good enough.

This is my choice for tables on Python - https://github.com/Robpol86/terminaltables. The appearance of tables is adequately configurable. The project is also actively maintained unlike some of the others.

Incredible how everyone in this thread has a different opinion on what is the best python library that works with table.

It's basically this in real time! https://xkcd.com/927/

Yeah. Probably, the reason is that you can code it easily in few hundred lines and it looks decent and cool.

If anyone interested in similar library in C language, take a look at my simple libTprint library: https://github.com/wizzard/libtprint Hope it helps!

This recalls some of the table formatting and exporting magic one can easily achieve with emacs org-mode. http://orgmode.org/guide/Tables.html And there, if you like, you can include a full set of spreadsheet operations.

Cool project. You might be able to use Hypothesis (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.org/en/master/) for testing this to make sure you catch all of the little edge cases.

csvlook [0] is another great tool that does this for any CSV file. It's part of the very useful csvkit[1] suite of command line utilities for working with CSV files.

[0] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/scripts/csvlook.html

[1] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

For Rubyists: https://github.com/geemus/formatador

To do this, I would just tab-delimit stdout and pipe through `column -t`. Though I can see how a dedicated lib would be better for some use cases.

Takes up too much (vertical) space.

I agree - perhaps there should be an option to control where and if you want to have the vertical and horizontal lines?

I've tried several of similar libraries, and still find `tabulate` the best.

Suggest a move to "Show HN"

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