tallboy

Generate pretty ASCII based tables on the terminal for your command line programs. Tallboy is written in Crystal.

┌─────┬─────┬─────┐
│  o  │  o  │  o  │
│─────┴─────┴─────│
│        o        │
│─────────────────│
│        o        │
└─────────────────┘

Top Features

• span cells across multiple columns
• text alignment (left, right, center)
• multi-line cells (via the newline character)
• preset & full custom styling

You can totally install it as a shard

1. Add the dependency to your shard.yml:

dependencies:
  tallboy:
    github: epoch/tallboy

2. Run shards install

Super simple to use

The core of the library is the Tallboy::Table class. Intended for storing data in a structured tabular form. Once data is stored rendering the table is done through Table#render.

require "tallboy"

data = [
  ["a","b","c"],
  ["d","e","f"]
]

table = Tallboy::Table.new(data)
puts table.render

+---+---+---+
| a | b | c |
| d | e | f |
+---+---+---+

Auto cell size and alignments

Columns will fit content automatically. Tallboy needs every row to have the same number of elements to work otherwise will raise an exception.

Setting alignments is also super flexible. You can set individual cell or whole columns. Here we are setting the last cell in the first row to align right.

data = [
  [1,2,3],
  ["hi", "", ""],
  ["first", "second", "third"],
  ["number one", "number two", "number three"]
]

table.row(0).cell(2).align = :right # align last cell of first row to right
table.column(0).align = :right      # align entire first column to right
puts table.render

+------------+------------+--------------+
|          1 | 2          |            3 |
|         hi |            |              |
|        1st | second     | third        |
| number one | number two | number three |
+------------+------------+--------------+

Column spanning greatness

Tallboy's key feature is column spanning through row layout. Say you have 4 rows of data and you want the first row to span 4 columns

data = [
  ["4/4", "",    "",    ""   ],
  ["3/4", "",    "",    "1/4"],
  ["2/4", "",    "2/4", ""   ],
  ["1/4", "1/4", "1/4", "1/4"]
]

table = Tallboy::Table.new(data)

Setting the first cell of the first row to span 4 columns with the layout keyword with an array representing how many columns to span.

table.row 0, layout: [4,0,0,0]

Setting the first cell of the second row to span 3 columns and last cell to span 1 column

table.row 1, layout: [3,0,0,1]

Setting the third row to span 2 and 2. Cells with 0 span have no width and is not rendered

table.row 2, layout: [2,0,2,0]

puts table.render(row_separator: true)

rendering the above table will get the following output

+-----------------------+
| 4/4                   |
+-----------------------+
| 3/4             | 1/4 |
+-----------------+-----+
| 2/4       | 2/4       |
+-----------+-----------+
| 1/4 | 1/4 | 1/4 | 1/4 |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+

table style presets

tallboy so far comes with 2 presets to render table with ascii characters or unicode characters

data = [
  ["a", "b", "c"],
  ["d", "e", "f"]
]

table = Tallboy::Table.new(data)
table.render(:unicode)

passing :unicode to render to draw a table with unicode characters

┌───┬───┬───┐
│ a │ b │ c │
│ d │ e │ f │
└───┴───┴───┘

more examples in the examples folder

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/epoch/tallboy/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Daniel Tsui - creator and maintainer