Consider deprecating in favour of "table" package

[gajus]

I have written a library for displaying data in a table.

https://github.com/gajus/table

This package implements all features of cli-table and addresses some of the open issues:

• Auto text wrap support? #35
• Fix escape sequences being counted towards length #8
• Alternative table character set for terminals not supporting Unicode #10
• Text alignment #64

Consider deprecating cli-table in favour of table package.

The reason I choose to write a library from the ground up is because I am building something that will heavily rely on text tables and neither of the implementations (ascii-table, cli-table or text-table) met my requirements. I have looked at all the source codes. ascii-table package had the best API, but I did not feel comfortable working with a codebase using prototype inheritance, no separation of logic and minimal test coverage.

I have put a lot of thinking into how to make table package modular, easy to test, easy to contribute to and easy to extend for different use cases.

[stevenvachon]

Cool. Does it also have truncation like cli-table?

[gajus]

@stephanethomas I cannot find the definition of "truncation" in the docs beyond brief statement in the "features" section ("Text truncation based on predefined widths").

If thats a generic truncation of a string in a column, then that falls outside of the "table" formation scope. I suggest you to use a utility function to format data before using it to draw a table, e.g. _.trunc in combination with _.map

That said, table library supports smart content wrapping (column maxWidth property).

[stevenvachon]

truncation with ellipsis: "this is a long sentence" would become "this is a…"

[gajus]

Do you it is the responsibility of the table formation library to truncate the data?

[stevenvachon]

Not necessarily, but it is convenient and would have familiarity with cli-table.

[jamestalmage]

http://github.com/jamestalmage/cli-table2 does truncation.

Also has colspan and rowspan, layouts can be as complex as you want.

[gajus]

@jamestalmage cli-table2 is quite nice. If I had known about it, I'd probably skipped developing table altogether.

I am thinking I pushed table logic a notch too far. Having static column widths (as in cli-table and cli-table2) makes the code logic considerably less complicated. Supporting colspan and rowspan using dynamic widths wouldn't be easy.

[jamestalmage]

@gajus Thank you!

Sorry I haven't promoted it better 😞

I do make an attempt to support dynamic widths, but it is limited. There is no way to set which column takes priority if there is contention for screen width, nor a way to set a minimum for a dynamic row.

[stevenvachon]

cli-table2 needs to be cleaned up, though ;) you had said it yourself, @jameskoster

[gajus]

@stevenvachon Please create an issue on https://github.com/gajus/table regarding the ability to truncate content. I will update README.md to reflect the requirement.

[jamestalmage]

@stevenvachon
There are improvements I want to make, and I mentioned a few issues that prevent completely deprecating this implementation for mine. I have never said "it needs to be cleaned up", or that it was not production ready. It has 100% test coverage, and fixes issues that have gone without resolution here for years. Most importantly, users who post to issues to cli-table2 have seen drastically faster response.

Here is the complete list of open cli-table issues which cli-table2 resolves:

• Variable height rows? #2
• Fix escape sequences being counted towards length #8
• Pushing "undefined" breaks in table.toString() #30
• Auto text wrap support? #35
• Always ignore color for column width calculation #41
• column (and row?) spanning #51
• Text alignment #64
• Option to turn off colors #74

[stevenvachon]

All I know regarding code cleanliness is that #51 (comment) contains

you'd be taking on maintaining a lot of my fugly code. Heaven help you ;)

[gajus]

V3 released:

• Added text truncation as requested by @stevenvachon.
• Added documentation about text wrapping.
• Removed minWidth, maxWidth properties in favour of a single property width.
• Added style for borderless table.
• Added drawJoin callback that controls whether a specific joining/separating row is drawn.
• Added columnDefault configuration property that sets default column properties that can be overwritten for each individual column.

[gajus]

Implemented streaming.

https://github.com/gajus/table#table-usage-streaming

[stevenvachon]

Wow, that streaming gif is enticing.

[gajus]

Implemented word wrapping, e.g.

Without wrapWord:

╔══════════════════════╗
║ Lorem ipsum dolor si ║
║ t amet, consectetur  ║
║ adipiscing elit. Pha ║
║ sellus pulvinar nibh ║
║ sed mauris convallis ║
║ dapibus. Nunc venena ║
║ tis tempus nulla sit ║
║ amet viverra.        ║
╚══════════════════════╝

with wrapWord:

╔══════════════════════╗
║ Lorem ipsum dolor    ║
║ sit amet,            ║
║ consectetur          ║
║ adipiscing elit.     ║
║ Phasellus pulvinar   ║
║ nibh sed mauris      ║
║ convallis dapibus.   ║
║ Nunc venenatis       ║
║ tempus nulla sit     ║
║ amet viverra.        ║
╚══════════════════════╝

[stevenvachon]

Hyphenated? :) awesome work

[ORESoftware]

Does it have multi-line rows? Looking for that feature in an ascii/unicode table now...

[tecfu]

@ORESoftware

tty-table handles multi-line rows out of the box. It also has a drop-in adapter automattic/cli-table.

var Table = require('tty-table/automattic-cli-table');

...

[gajus]

How exactly is this better than "table" package?

On Jun 1, 2016, at 00:44, 5fec8fdadc460cb8540a901f08ef288b [email protected] wrote:

@ORESoftware

tty-table handles multi-line rows out of the box. It also has a drop-in adapter automattic/cli-table.

var Table = require('tty-table/automattic-cli-table');

...

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