[colug-432] Nice Plain Text Columns and Avoiding NIH

[Jeff Frontz]

Sorry, I should have used a "\t" to avoid ambiguity when reading the
field separator setting, so

awk -F"\t" ...




On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Jeff Frontz <jeff.frontz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it is that you want, but I would think
> that such a tool if it existed would (as Jim W suggests) end up being
> pretty much the parsing and output formatting components of awk.
>
> awk -F" " ' {printf "%22s %33s %11s", $1, $2, $3 }' # tab character
> between double quotes
>
> Unless you were thinking that it would figure out the maximum lengths
> of everything and then have an appropriate column size?  Then
> something like this:
>
> awk -F" " '{
>
>    for (x = 1; x <= NF; x++)
>    {
>         save[NR, x] = $x
>         len = length($x)
>         if (len > maxLen[x])
>         {
>              maxLen[x] = len
>         }
>    }
>
>    if (NF > maxParms)
>    {
>            maxParms = NF
>    }
>
>    totalLines++
> }
>
> END {
>         for (lines = 0; lines <= totalLines; lines++)
>         {
>                   for (parm = 1; parm <= maxParms; parm++)
>                   {
>                             format = "%-" maxLen[parm] "s "
>                             printf format, save[lines, parm]
>                   }
>
>                   printf "\n"
>         }
> }
> '
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 9:42 PM,  <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 7 Aug 2011 18:05:25 -0400 (EDT), Jim Wildman <jim at rossberry.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 7 Aug 2011, jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:
>>>
>>> > I have a plain text file with variable width fields delimited by tabs.
>>> > What filter program(s) are good at making the columns line up in
>>> > plain text output?
>>
>>> awk is your tool.  See printf output formatting in man awk.
>>
>> I was hoping to avoid writing my own code for that.
>> This seems like the kind of thing that has been solved many
>> times before (like for the output of ls -l).
>> I was hoping to avoid reinventing (or recoding) the wheel.
>>
>