Term::Table

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (3)
Updated: 2021-01-27
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NAME

Term::Table - Format a header and rows into a table

DESCRIPTION

This is used by some failing tests to provide diagnostics about what has gone wrong. This module is able to generic format rows of data into tables.

SYNOPSIS

    use Term::Table;

    my $table = Term::Table->new(
        max_width      => 80,    # defaults to terminal size
        pad            => 4,     # Extra padding between table and max-width (defaults to 4)
        allow_overflow => 0,     # default is 0, when off an exception will be thrown if the table is too big
        collapse       => 1,     # do not show empty columns

        header => ['name', 'age', 'hair color'],
        rows   => [
            ['Fred Flinstone',  2000000, 'black'],
            ['Wilma Flinstone', 1999995, 'red'],
            ...
        ],
    );

    say $_ for $table->render;

This prints a table like this:

    +-----------------+---------+------------+
    | name            | age     | hair color |
    +-----------------+---------+------------+
    | Fred Flinstone  | 2000000 | black      |
    | Wilma Flinstone | 1999995 | red        |
    | ...             | ...     | ...        |
    +-----------------+---------+------------+

INTERFACE

    use Term::Table;
    my $table = Term::Table->new(...);

OPTIONS

header => [ ... ]

If you want a header specify it here. This takes an arrayref with each columns heading.

rows => [ [...], [...], ... ]

This should be an arrayref containing an arrayref per row.

collapse => $bool

Use this if you want to hide empty columns, that is any column that has no data in any row. Having a header for the column will not effect collapse.

max_width => $num

Set the maximum width of the table, the table may not be this big, but it will be no bigger. If none is specified it will attempt to find the width of your terminal and use that, otherwise it falls back to the terminal width or 80.

pad => $num

Defaults to 4, extra padding for row width calculations. Default is for legacy support. Set this to 0 to turn padding off.

allow_overflow => $bool

Defaults to 0. If this is off then an exception will be thrown if the table cannot be made to fit inside the max-width. If this is set to 1 then the table will be rendered anyway, larger than max-width, if it is not possible to stay within the max-width. In other words this turns max-width from a hard-limit to a soft recommendation.

sanitize => $bool

This will sanitize all the data in the table such that newlines, control characters, and all whitespace except for ASCII 20 ' ' are replaced with escape sequences. This prevents newlines, tabs, and similar whitespace from disrupting the table.

Note: newlines are marked as '\n', but a newline is also inserted into the data so that it typically displays in a way that is useful to humans.

Example:

    my $field = "foo\nbar\nbaz\n";

    print join "\n" => table(
        sanitize => 1,
        rows => [
            [$field,      'col2'     ],
            ['row2 col1', 'row2 col2']
        ]
    );

Prints:

    +-----------------+-----------+
    | foo\n           | col2      |
    | bar\n           |           |
    | baz\n           |           |
    |                 |           |
    | row2 col1       | row2 col2 |
    +-----------------+-----------+

So it marks the newlines by inserting the escape sequence, but it also shows the data across as many lines as it would normally display.

mark_tail => $bool

This will replace the last whitespace character of any trailing whitespace with its escape sequence. This makes it easier to notice trailing whitespace when comparing values.

show_header => $bool

Set this to false to hide the header. This defaults to true if the header is set, false if no header is provided.

auto_columns => $bool

Set this to true to automatically add columns that are not named in the header. This defaults to false if a header is provided, and defaults to true when there is no header.

no_collapse => [ $col_num_a, $col_num_b, ... ]

no_collapse => [ $col_name_a, $col_name_b, ... ]

no_collapse => { $col_num_a => 1, $col_num_b => 1, ... }

no_collapse => { $col_name_a => 1, $col_name_b => 1, ... }

Specify (by number and/or name) columns that should not be removed when empty. The 'name' form only works when a header is specified. There is currently no protection to insure that names you specify are actually in the header, invalid names are ignored, patches to fix this will be happily accepted.

NOTE ON UNICODE/WIDE CHARACTERS

Some unicode characters, such as "婧" ("U+5A67") are wider than others. These will render just fine if you "use utf8;" as necessary, and Unicode::GCString is installed, however if the module is not installed there will be anomalies in the table:

    +-----+-----+---+
    | a   | b   | c |
    +-----+-----+---+
    | 婧 | x   | y |
    | x   | y   | z |
    | x   | 婧 | z |
    +-----+-----+---+

SOURCE

The source code repository for Term-Table can be found at http://github.com/exodist/Term-Table/.

MAINTAINERS

Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org>

AUTHORS

Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

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

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/