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.

License

The MIT License (MIT)