taalika: plain text tables in Rust

Builds plain, automatically-aligned tables of monospaced text. This is basically what you want if you are implementing ls.

Example

use taalika::{Table, Row};
use std::path::Path;

fn ls(dir: &Path) -> ::std::io::Result<()> {
    let mut table = Table::new("{:>}  {:<}{:<}  {:<}");
    for entry_result in ::std::fs::read_dir(dir)? {
        let entry    = entry_result?;
        let metadata = entry.metadata()?;

        table.add_row(Row::new()
             .with_cell(metadata.len())
             .with_cell(if metadata.permissions().readonly() {"r"} else {""})
             .with_cell(if metadata.is_dir() {"d"} else {""})
             .with_cell(entry.path().display()));
    }

    print!("{}", table);

    Ok(())
}

ls(Path::new("target")).unwrap();

produces something like

1198     target/.rustc_info.json
1120  d  target/doc
 192  d  target/package
1056  d  target/debug

Other features

• The Table::with_heading() and Table::add_heading() methods add lines that span all columns.

• The row! macro builds a row with a fixed number of columns using less syntax.

• The Table::set_line_end() method allows changing the line ending to include a carriage return (or whatever you want).

• The Row::with_ansi_cell and Row::add_ansi_cell methods can be used to add cells with ANSI color codes, and still have their widths be computed correctly.

Usage

taalika is on crates.io.

Features

• Feature unicode-width is used to compute the width of columns in terms of Unicode graphemes. It is enabled by default and depends on the unicode-width crate.

  Note that without unicode-width, alignment will be based on the count of the std::str::Chars iterator.

This crate supports Rust version 1.46.0 and later.

See also

You may also want:

• tabular - taalika is a fork of this crate with additional features.

• text-tables – This is more automatic than tabular. You give it an array of arrays, it renders a nice table with borders. Tabular doesn't do borders.

• prettytable — This has an API more similar to tabular’s in terms of building a table, but it does a lot more, including, color, borders, and CSV import.