Tababular
A simple .NET monospace text table formatting library for .NET 4.5 and .NET Standard 1.6.
You can use it if you are standing with a bunch of objects or dictionaries in your hand, and you wish for them to become as nice as this:
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| FirstColumn | SecondColumn | ThirdColumn |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| r1 | hej | hej igen |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| r2 | hej | hej igen |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
This can easily be achieved by newing up the TableFormatter like this:
var formatter = new TableFormatter();
and then you call an appropriate Format*** method on it, e.g. FormatObjects:
var objects = new[]
{
new {FirstColumn = "r1", SecondColumn = "hej", ThirdColumn = "hej igen"},
new {FirstColumn = "r2", SecondColumn = "hej", ThirdColumn = "hej igen"},
};
var text = tableFormatter.FormatObjects(objects);
Console.WriteLine(text);
which will result in the table shown above.
For now, Tababular does not support that much stuff - but one nice thing about it is that it will properly format lines in cells, so that e.g.
var objects = new[]
{
new { MachineName = "ctxtest01", Ip = "10.0.0.10", Ports = new[] {80, 8080, 9090}},
new { MachineName = "ctxtest02", Ip = "10.0.0.11", Ports = new[] {80, 5432}}
};
var text = new TableFormatter().FormatObjects(objects);
Console.WriteLine(text);
becomes nice like this:
+-----------+-------------+-------+
| Ip | MachineName | Ports |
+-----------+-------------+-------+
| 10.0.0.10 | ctxtest01 | 80 |
| | | 8080 |
| | | 9090 |
+-----------+-------------+-------+
| 10.0.0.11 | ctxtest02 | 80 |
| | | 5432 |
+-----------+-------------+-------+
which looks pretty neat if you ask me.
Formatting different things
Tababular can format different things, which at the moment includes:
- Objects:
formatter.FormatObjects(objects) - Dictionaries:
formatter.FormatDictionaries(dictionaries) - JSON:
formatter.FormatJson(jsonText)
More niceness
What about longs texts? Consider this example where the "Comments" column can be used to supply arbitrarily long texts:
var objects = new[]
{
new {MachineName = "ctxtest01", Ip = "10.0.0.10", Ports = new[] {80, 8080, 9090}, Comments = ""},
new {MachineName = "ctxtest02", Ip = "10.0.0.11", Ports = new[] {5432},
Comments = @"This bad boy hosts our database and a couple of internal jobs."}
};
var text = new TableFormatter().FormatObjects(objects);
In this case, the resulting table would look like this:
+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| Comments | Ip | MachineName | Ports |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| | 10.0.0.10 | ctxtest01 | 80 |
| | | | 8080 |
| | | | 9090 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| This bad boy hosts our database and a couple of internal jobs. | 10.0.0.11 | ctxtest02 | 5432 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
which might be fine, but since the texts can be even longer than this, it might end up being a problem.
Fear not! We can supply a small hint to the table formatter like this:
var hints = new Hints { MaxTableWidth = 80 };
var formatter = new TableFormatter(hints);
and then when we
var text = formatter.FormatObjects(objects);
it will look like this:
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| Comments | Ip | MachineName | Ports |
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| | 10.0.0.10 | ctxtest01 | 80 |
| | | | 8080 |
| | | | 9090 |
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
| This bad boy hosts our database and a couple | 10.0.0.11 | ctxtest02 | 5432 |
| of internal jobs. | | | |
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------+-------+
and the table will never become wider than at most 80 characters. Objectively speaking, this is actually freaking awesome.