tabulate-rs

Rust port of the excellent python-tabulate library for pretty-printing tabular data.

Project Goals

• Provide a drop-in textual table renderer for Rust that mirrors the Python project’s behaviour.
• Offer a builder-style API (TabulateOptions) that keeps configuration explicit while defaulting to the same semantics as python-tabulate.
• Maintain feature parity with python-tabulate 0.9.0, covering formats, alignment rules, wrapping, and data normalisation.

Parity Status (python-tabulate 0.9.0)

The current implementation matches python-tabulate 0.9.0 for:

• Table formats: all 30+ built-ins including plain/simple/grid variants, pipe, GitHub/MediaWiki/Textile, HTML/unsafeHTML, LaTeX family, ANSI-aware formats, wide-character grids, ASCII/Unicode outlines, TSV, YouTrack, AsciiDoc, and custom simple_separated_format.
• Formatting features:
  • Numeric parsing with per-column disable lists (disable_numparse and disable_numparse_columns).
  • Column and header alignment (global, per-column, decimal alignment, row alignment, “same as column” header semantics).
  • Word wrapping with max_col_widths / max_header_col_widths, multiline cell handling, and whitespace preservation.
  • Missing value placeholders (single and per-column).
• Data inputs: sequences of sequences, dicts and dicts-of-iterables (with padding for uneven columns), namedtuples, dataclasses, NumPy ndarrays and structured/record arrays, pandas DataFrames (including multi-index), and data sources using SEPARATING_LINE.

Snapshot fixtures (tests/fixtures/python_snapshots.json) are generated directly from python-tabulate 0.9.0 via scripts/generate_snapshots.py, and the python_snapshot_parity test ensures all formats and options stay in sync.

python scripts/generate_snapshots.py

Quick Start

use tabulate::{tabulate, TabulateOptions};

let data = vec![
    vec!["Planet", "Radius (km)", "Mass (10^24 kg)"],
    vec!["Mercury", "2440", "0.330"],
    vec!["Venus", "6052", "4.87"],
];

let table = tabulate(
    data,
    TabulateOptions::new()
        .headers(tabulate::Headers::FirstRow)
        .table_format("grid"),
).unwrap();

println!("{table}");

Development Notes

• Run cargo test to ensure unit tests and snapshot parity checks pass.
• Regenerate Python fixtures via python /tmp/generate_snapshots.py after adding new cases.
• The crate re-exports the table format registry so custom TableFormat instances can be supplied via TabulateOptions::table_format_custom.

Examples

Run the basic example:

cargo run --example basic

This prints:

+----------+---------------+---------------------+
| Planet   |   Radius (km) |     Mass (10^24 kg) |
+==========+===============+=====================+
| Mercury  |          2440 |               0.33  |
+----------+---------------+---------------------+
| Venus    |          6052 |               4.87  |
+----------+---------------+---------------------+
| Earth    |          6371 |               5.97  |
+----------+---------------+---------------------+
| Mars     |          3390 |               0.642 |
+----------+---------------+---------------------+

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0