# Catalist

Reads the data, not the comments. It's like cat(1), but for lists. Hah.

Catalist is designed to be a small and fast program to only read the content of a list, not the information intended to keep it organised.

## Installation

Catalist can be installed through [cargo](https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo). This will build it from source.

```console
$ cargo install catalist
```

## Usage

Catalist can read from files or from stdin. If no files are given, it will default to reading from stdin.

The contents of `example.list`:

```console
$ cat example.list
# Metavariables are useful for programming!
Foo
Bar
Baz

# These ones are barely used
Qux Quux
Quuz
```

Catalist ignores empty lines and comments. Lines containing whitespace are automatically quoted.

```console
$ catalist example.list
Foo
Bar
Baz
"Qux Quux"
Quuz
```

### Quotes

The quote logic can be changed by providing the `--quotes <logic>` option. The option takes one of `auto`, `always`, or `never`. If the option is omitted, catalist defaults to `auto`.

```console
$ catalist --quotes always example.list
"Foo"
"Bar"
"Baz"
"Qux Quux"
"Quuz"
```

### Input

Catalist will read from stdin if the file name is a dash (`-`) or there are no files given.

```console
$ cat example.list | catalist --quotes never
Foo
Bar
Baz
Qux Quux
Quuz
```

### Comments

A comment is a hash (`#`) either preceeded by whitespace or at the start of a line. Everything else is treated as content.

```console
$ cat comments.list
# This is a comment

Example # comment
This is# not a comment

$ catalist comments.list
Example
"This is# not a comment"
```

## License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.