A light tabula(items, options) function for printing a text table to stdout.

Why another one? I had one that worked for me and wanted to re-use it. Trawling through dozens of available ones on npm was a chore I haven't done. I'd welcome a table-printing node.js bake off.

Install

npm install tabula

Usage

var tabula = require('tabula');

var items = [
    {name: 'trent', age: 38, game: 'hockey'},
    {name: 'ewan', age: 4, game: 'chess'}
];

tabula(items);
/* prints:
NAME   AGE  GAME
trent  38   hockey
ewan   4    chess
*/

tabula(items, {columns: ['name', 'age']});
/* prints:
NAME   AGE
trent  38
ewan   4
*/

tabula(items, {
    columns: ['name', 'age'],
    skipHeader: true
});
/* prints:
trent  38
ewan   4
*/

// Sort by age. Attempts numeric sort on given fields.
// Note: This actually sorts the given `items` array in-place.
tabula(items, {
    columns: ['name', 'age'],
    sort: ['age']
});
/* prints:
NAME   AGE
ewan   4
trent  38
*/

TODO

• document dottedLookup
• document column align=right
• document opts.noAnsi
• document column width, maxWidth
• document sort.*.keyFunc

tabula CLI

There is also a tabula CLI that can be used for emitting a table from a stream of JSON objects (or a single JSON array). E.g.:

$ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula
NAME   AGE
trent  38
ewan   4

# column selection
$ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula name
NAME
trent
ewan

# sorting
$ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula -s age
NAME   AGE
ewan   4
trent  38

Features

This section is an (incomplete) list and demo of some of tabula's features.

ANSI escape codes

tabula (as of version 1.7.0) properly calculates widths for cells using ANSI escape codes for coloring. E.g. try this sample:

var tabula = require('tabula');
function red(s) {
    return '\033[31m' + s + '\033[39m';
}
tabula([
    { name: 'Trent', age: 42, job: 'Engineer' },
    { name: 'Ewan', age: red(8), job: 'Student' },
]);

TODO

• Describe the "opinions", features and limitations of this module.

• tabula CLI for piping in a JSON array of objects, or stream of objects.

  • streaming
  • option for skipping non-JSON lines (e.g. for bunyan logs)
  • option for non-JSON input? e.g. space separated ('json -ga foo bar' output, output from other table-emitting things, perhaps then 2-space or more separated), naive-csv
  • separate tabula-cli module?
  • test cases

• Merge this with node-tab if reasonable. I have some PR work for it (that I haven't completed) to add some conveniences that tabulate provides. It is silly to have two table-printing libs in play.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt.

node-tabula changelog

not yet released

(nothing yet)

1.10.0

• [pull #5] Support keyFunc for finer sorting control.

1.9.0

• Table content should be '' and not '\n' if there is no output (no output results from both opts.skipHeader and there being no rows).

1.8.0

• Support width and maxWidth optional column parameters. The former hardcodes a width for that column -- overriding the calculation of the width from the column name and cell values. The latter sets an upper limit on that calculated value. For example:

    tabula(items, {
        columns: [
            {
                lookup: 'name',
                maxWidth: 30
            },
            'age'
        ]
    });

1.7.0

• Support for ANSI escape codes (used for colouring) in table cells. Before this change, the table cell widths would get messed up.

1.6.1

• [pull #3] Don't error on failed lookup (by Dave Eddy).

1.6.0

• Support for right-aligned columns. The default align is "left".

    tabula(items, {
        columns: [
            'name',
            {
                lookup: 'size',
                align: 'right'
            }
        ]
    });

1.5.0

• [pull #2] allow empty data with column headers.
• Add example with custom column names to --help output.

1.4.2

• Clean tabula -h output.

1.4.1

• Fix a breakage in v1.4.0 when validFields is specified.

1.4.0

• Entries in the columns array option to tabula() and tabulaFormat() can now be an object with lookup and name keys. This allows one to override the default name = lookup.toUpperCase(). E.g.:

    var items = [{'name':'trent','age':38}, {'name':'ewan','age':4}];
    tabula(items, {columns: ['name', {name: 'Age', lookup: 'age'}]});

  to get:

    NAME   Age
    trent  38
    ewan   4

  Support for specifying the name was added to the tabula CLI:

    $ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' \
        | tabula name age:Age
    NAME   Age
    trent  38
    ewan   4

1.3.0

• New dottedLookup boolean option to support looking up properties of objects in the row data.

    $ echo '[{"name":{"first":"trent","last":"mick"},"age":38},
        {"name":{"first":"ewan"},"age":4}]' \
        | tabula name.first age --dotted-lookup
    NAME.FIRST  AGE
    trent       38
    ewan        4

  Without this option:

    $ echo '[{"name":{"first":"trent","last":"mick"},"age":38},
        {"name":{"first":"ewan"},"age":4}]' \
        | tabula name.first age
    NAME.FIRST  AGE
    -           38
    -           4

In node.js code this looks like:

    tabula(rows, {dottedLookup: true, ...})

1.2.2

• Return an empty string from tabulaFormat if the given array if items is empty. Otherwise tabulaPrint blows up trying to write undefined.

1.2.1

• Export sortArrayOfObjects function. This is used internally for opts.sort handling, however it might be useful in CLIs that want to sort in the same way as table formatting would even if not using table formatting. E.g. a CLI that has a "-j, --json" option to emit JSON.

1.2.0

• Add a (mostly for play) tabula CLI that can be used for emitting a table from a stream of JSON objects (or a single JSON array). E.g.

    $ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula
    NAME   AGE
    trent  38
    ewan   4
  
    # column selection
    $ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula name
    NAME
    trent
    ewan
  
    # sorting
    $ echo '[{"name":"trent","age":38}, {"name":"ewan","age":4}]' | tabula -s age
    NAME   AGE
    ewan   4
    trent  38

1.1.1

• Drop debugging code.

1.1.0

• Render complex cell values (objects and arrays) with JSON.stringify(value) and functions a la util.inspect(). E.g.:

    tabula([
        {"foo":"bar","obj":{"one":1}},
        {"foo":"baz","obj":{"two":2}}
    ]);

  results in:

    FOO  OBJ
    bar  {"one":1}
    baz  {"two":2}

• Make options.columns optional -- defaults to the keys of the first item. This allows one to just naively pass in an array of objects.

1.0.0

First release.