tab

climate/tab

Clean, elastic tabbed columns for terminal output.

tab takes a string of whitespace-separated text and formats it into aligned columns using Go's tabwriter.

Installation

go get github.com/grimdork/climate/tab

Usage

Full column mode

Every whitespace boundary becomes a column break:

input := "Name Role Status\nAlice Admin Active\nBob User Offline"
output, _ := tab.Tabulate(input, false)
fmt.Print(output)
// Name   Role   Status
// Alice  Admin  Active
// Bob    User   Offline

Two-column mode

The first word is column one, everything else is column two:

input := "serve Start the web server\nconfig Show current configuration\nhelp Display this message"
output, _ := tab.Tabulate(input, true)
fmt.Print(output)
// serve   Start the web server
// config  Show current configuration
// help    Display this message

Useful for command lists, key-description pairs, or any label+text layout.

SplitColumns

If you need the parsed rows without formatting:

rows, _ := tab.SplitColumns(input, false)
// rows is [][]string

CSV input

Parse CSV with proper quoting support. The first row becomes a header with a separator line:

csv := "Name,Role,Status\nAlice,Admin,Active\n\"Eve, Jr\",Guest,Pending"
output, _ := tab.TabulateCSV(csv)
fmt.Print(output)
// Name     Role   Status
// -------  -----  -------
// Alice    Admin  Active
// Eve, Jr  Guest  Pending

Handles quoted fields, commas inside values, and all standard CSV rules via Go's encoding/csv.

TSV input

TabulateTSV and SplitColumnsTSV parse tab-separated values and preserve empty cells. Use these when your data may contain empty fields between consecutive tabs.

tsv := "a\tb\tc\n1\t\t3\n4\t5\t\n"
output, _ := tab.TabulateTSV(tsv)
fmt.Print(output)
// a   b   c
// 1       3
// 4   5

If you prefer the whitespace-driven behaviour (collapsing consecutive whitespace), keep using Tabulate(input, false).