Tabfmt 0.1 review

Tabfmt is a command line utility to format tabular data

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Claudio Jolowicz

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Tabfmt is a command line utility to format tabular data. Tabfmt project reads lines from one or more files or from standard input, breaks the lines into fields given a set of input field delimiters, and prints a table with constant-width columns to standard output or a specified file.

Minimum and maximum field widths, left and right padding, as well as the characters used for filling, padding and delimiting the fields can be specified.

This program is meant to integrate well with the standard UNIX utilities for text processing. It is specialised in a simple, everyday task which is usually too bothersome to implement in shell scripting. While tabfmt currently formats the table in plain text, extensions may include output in other formats such as HTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, or XML languages.

The program was originally written for the GNU environment, but should build and run on a wide variety of platforms thanks to the GNU autotools and a portability library which is compiled and linked as needed (gnulib). It has been successfully built on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X.

The program provides support for localisation using the GNU gettext package; a German language translation has been provided by the author. The package contains a preliminary test suite.