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

[Jeff Frontz]

There is an existing (not sure what "pre-existing" would be--
something before it existed?) program that does just what you say and
it's got an infinite number of command-line options to allow parsing
whatever input and creating whatever format of output you want.

It's called "awk".



On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 8:47 AM,  <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> Let's start over.
>
> On Sun, 7 Aug 2011 22:16:18 -0400, Jeff Frontz <jeff.frontz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it is that you want, ...
>
> You are not the only one to misunderstand what I want.
>
> First of all, I am _not_ asking how to make a program,
> or about techniques for making a program.
> For decades, I have known many ways to make such a program.
> I was trying to avoid writing such a program altogether.
> Instead I was wanting to know of an already existing program
> that someone else had written.
>
> Here's what I am looking for.
>
> A _pre-existing_ program that:
>    o   is a classic plain text filter
>    o   uses tabs to delimit input fields (columns)
>    o   echoes the input, replacing tabs with enough spaces so
>        as to make the fields line up in nice columns
>        o   each column would only get as much space as it
>            needs to line up nice
>            (program would have to read all input to figure
>            output width of each field, before outputting
>            anything)
>        o   output columns would be separated with a single ' '
>
> or more fancily:
>
> A _pre-existing_ program that:
>    o   is a classic plain text filter
>    o   uses tabs to delimit input fields (columns)
>        (option to specify arbitrary delimiter would be nice)
>    o   echoes the input, replacing tabs with spaces so
>        as to make the fields line up in nice columns
>        o   each column would only get as much space as it
>            needs to line up nice
>            (program would have to read all input to figure
>            output width of each field, before outputting
>            anything)
>            (would be nice to have option to limit width of
>            particular output columns)
>            (would be nice to have option to specify minimum
>            width for particular output columns)
>        o   output columns would be separated with a single ' '
>            (option to specify other separator would be nice)
>
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