Feature: set column max width (or automatically truncate input)

[ckoehler]

Hello,

I really appreciate what you did here! I was wondering if/when you are planning to add an optional max width for a column, with some kind of word wrap, or even just respecting newlines in a string and looking at the longest line only.

Thanks!

Christoph

[rrrene]

This has been partially fixed here: #11

[dadooda]

@rrrene

Any plans/progress implementing the max column width, too?

Word wrapping might take substantial effort to implement, but there are applications which would accept broken layout for values which are too long, like this:

+-------+-----------------+
| Price | Name            |
+-------+-----------------+
|  5.95 | Green mug       |
|  9.95 | Red kettle      |
| 49.99 | Long long long long long long name which is actually invalid data |
+-------+-----------------+

It's "garbage in, garbage out", fair principle.

[rrrene]

I thought about max_width, and unfortunately it seems like an overly complicated thing to do for little reward (imho).

One problem that sprung to mind was having multiple cells with colspans and one of the columns has a max_width...

So - no plans, sorry.

If you have values that should have a max_width just truncate or word-wrap the values in advance (that's one reason I implemented multi-line columns in the first place).

[dadooda]

One problem that sprung to mind was having multiple cells with
colspans and one of the columns has a max_width...
So - no plans, sorry.

No problem, just wanted to confirm.

Looks like using text tables for development reports (my case) and
drawing text tables in general differ more than it seems at first
glance.

E.g. I'm okay with no fancy decorative features like colspans and
styles, but the ability to limit the width is critical.

----- Original Message -----
From: René Föhring [email protected]
To: Alex Fortuna [email protected]
CC:
Time: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:37:04 -0800
Subject: [terminal-table] Feature: set column max width (#1)
Attachments:

I thought about max_width, and unfortunately it seems like an overly complicated thing to do for little reward (imho).

One problem that sprung to mind was having multiple cells with colspans and one of the columns has a max_width...

So - no plans, sorry.

If you have values that should have a max_width just truncate or word-wrap the values in advance (that's one reason I implemented multi-line columns in the first place).

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#1 (comment)

[rrrene]

You can (indirectly) set the max-width by controlling the input data. That is not as sweet as setting :max-width => 80 but you have other advantages like being transparent and in total control of the outputted data.

[glebm]

I wrote the following code to wrap (break-word) a string in i18n-tasks:

def wrap_string(s, max)
  chars = []
  dist = 0
  s.chars.each do |c|
    chars << c
    dist += 1
    if c == "\n"
      dist = 0
    elsif dist == max
      dist = 0
      chars << "\n"
    end
  end
  chars = chars[0..-2] if chars.last == "\n"
  chars.join
end

[fwolfst]

In a similar vain, I would find it great if Terminal-Table had a :wrap option (maybe true|truncate|false) to break long rows into two rows. Too busy right now to implement or write a spec. Should I open another issue for that? Thanks.