NAME

Text::Table::Tiny - simple text tables from 2D arrays, with limited templating options

SYNOPSIS

    use Text::Table::Tiny 0.04 qw/ generate_table /;

    my $rows = [
        # header row
        ['Name', 'Rank', 'Serial'],
        # rows
        ['alice', 'pvt', '123456'],
        ['bob',   'cpl', '98765321'],
        ['carol', 'brig gen', '8745'],
    ];
    print generate_table(rows => $rows, header_row => 1);

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a single function, generate_table, which formats a two-dimensional array of data as a text table.

The example shown in the SYNOPSIS generates the following table:

    +-------+----------+----------+
    | Name  | Rank     | Serial   |
    +-------+----------+----------+
    | alice | pvt      | 123456   |
    | bob   | cpl      | 98765321 |
    | carol | brig gen | 8745     |
    +-------+----------+----------+

NOTE: the interface changed with version 0.04, so if you use the generate_table() function illustrated above, then you need to require at least version 0.04 of this module, as shown in the SYNOPSIS.

generate_table()

The generate_table function understands three arguments, which are passed as a hash.

• rows

  Takes an array reference which should contain one or more rows of data, where each row is an array reference.

• header_row

  If given a true value, the first row in the data will be interpreted as a header row, and separated from the rest of the table with a ruled line.

• separate_rows

  If given a true value, a separator line will be drawn between every row in the table, and a thicker line will be used for the header separator.

• top_and_tail

  If given a true value, then the top and bottom border lines will be skipped. This reduces the vertical height of the generated table.

EXAMPLES

If you just pass the data and no other options:

 generate_table(rows => $rows);

You get minimal ruling:

    +-------+----------+----------+
    | Name  | Rank     | Serial   |
    | alice | pvt      | 123456   |
    | bob   | cpl      | 98765321 |
    | carol | brig gen | 8745     |
    +-------+----------+----------+

If you want lines between every row, and also want a separate header:

 generate_table(rows => $rows, header_row => 1, separate_rows => 1);

You get the maximally ornate:

    +-------+----------+----------+
    | Name  | Rank     | Serial   |
    O=======O==========O==========O
    | alice | pvt      | 123456   |
    +-------+----------+----------+
    | bob   | cpl      | 98765321 |
    +-------+----------+----------+
    | carol | brig gen | 8745     |
    +-------+----------+----------+

FORMAT VARIABLES

You can set a number of package variables inside the Text::Table::Tiny package to configure the appearance of the table. This interface is likely to be deprecated in the future, and some other mechanism provided.

• $Text::Table::Tiny::COLUMN_SEPARATOR = '|';

• $Text::Table::Tiny::ROW_SEPARATOR = '-';

• $Text::Table::Tiny::CORNER_MARKER = '+';

• $Text::Table::Tiny::HEADER_ROW_SEPARATOR = '=';

• $Text::Table::Tiny::HEADER_CORNER_MARKER = 'O';

PREVIOUS INTERFACE

Prior to version 0.04 this module provided a function called table(), which wasn't available for export. It took exactly the same arguments:

 use Text::Table::Tiny;
 my $rows = [ ... ];
 print Text::Table::Tiny::table(rows => $rows, separate_rows => 1, header_row => 1);

For backwards compatibility this interface is still supported. The table() function isn't available for export though.

SEE ALSO

There are many modules for formatting text tables on CPAN. A good number of them are listed in the See Also section of the documentation for Text::Table::Manifold.

REPOSITORY

https://github.com/neilb/Text-Table-Tiny

AUTHOR

Creighton Higgins <chiggins@chiggins.com>

Now maintained by Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2012 by Creighton Higgins.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

cpanm Text::Table::Tiny

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Text::Table::Tiny