table-format

Format Python code (list of lists) as a fixed width table.

Motivation and usage

You've got some tests or other code like this:

def test_the_table():
    assert generate_the_table() == [
        ['Date', 'Description', 'Amount', 'Balance'],
        ['2021-04-06', 'Account opened', 0, 0],
        ['2021-04-07', 'Cash deposit at 123 Main St, Newtown', 1000, 1000],
        ['2021-04-08', 'ACME anvils', -300, 700],
    ]

Or maybe even worse like this:

assert generate_the_table() == [
    [
        "Date",
        "Description",
        "Amount",
        "Balance",
    ],
    [
        "2021-04-06",
        "Account opened",
        0,
        0,
    ],
    [
        "2021-04-07",
        "Cash deposit at 123 Main St, Newtown",
        1000,
        1000,
    ],
    [
        "2021-04-08",
        "ACME anvils",
        -300,
        700,
    ],
]

Wouldn't it be nice to have readable tests with columns all lined up?

Copy the whole list of lists to the clipboard, then pipe to table-format --guess-indent. On Linux you could use xsel or xclip etc:

$ xsel | table-format --guess-indent
[
        ['Date',       'Description',                          'Amount', 'Balance'],
        ['2021-04-06', 'Account opened',                       0,        0        ],
        ['2021-04-07', 'Cash deposit at 123 Main St, Newtown', 1000,     1000     ],
        ['2021-04-08', 'ACME anvils',                          -300,     700      ],
    ]

The output should be ready to paste back into your editor.

Options

Pass the --help flag to show all options:

$ table-format --help

⬇️ Installation

The most recent release can be installed from PyPI with:

$ pip install table-format

You can also use pipx to install it more conveniently in an isolated environment:

$ pipx install table-format

See CHANGES for changelog.

The most recent code and data can be installed directly from GitHub with:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/spookylukey/table-format.git

To install in development mode, use the following:

$ git clone git+https://github.com/spookylukey/table-format.git
$ cd table-format
$ pip install -e .

Other tips

Black

Black will revert code formatted like this. But you can use # fmt: off and # fmt: on commands to stop black reformatting these blocks.

Flake8

Flake8 might complain about:

• E202 - whitespace before ]
• E241 - multiple spaces after comma
• E501 - line too long

You can silence these using noqa:E202,E241,E501, which you can automatically add to the end of each line like this:

$ table-format --add-noqa=E202,E241,E501

Other noqa items and other end of line comments will be preserved.

Emacs

With default keybindings, doing C-u M-| table-format --guess-indent ENTER will replace the current region with the formatted version from table-format.

You can wrap it up in a nice function like this:

(defun align-python-table ()
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region
   ;; beginning and end of region
   (region-beginning)
   (region-end)
   ;; command and parameters
   "table-format --guess-indent"
   ;; output buffer
   (current-buffer)
   ;; replace?
   t
   ;; name of the error buffer
   "*Table-Format Error Buffer*"
   ;; show error buffer?
   t))

Other editors

Contributions of instructions to make this easy to use in other editors are very welcome!

⚖️ License

The code in this package is licensed under the MIT License.

🙏 Contributing

Contributions, whether filing an issue, making a pull request, or forking, are appreciated. See CONTRIBUTING.rst for more information on getting involved.

🛠️ Development

The final section of the README is you for if you want to get involved by making a code contribution.

❓ Testing

After cloning the repository and installing tox with pip install tox, the unit tests in the tests/ folder can be run reproducibly with:

$ tox

Additionally, these tests are automatically re-run with each commit in a GitHub Action.

🍪 Cookiecutter Acknowledgement

This package was created with @audreyfeldroy's cookiecutter package using @cthoyt's cookiecutter-python-package template.