Pylsy: Python library to represent tabular data in ASCII tables (github.com)

Takes up too much (vertical) space.

Isn't that exactly what tabulate has been doing very well for a while? https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tabulate

Note the variety of formats: 'ascii', but also html, latex & co.

PrettyTable is an established library which does the same: https://code.google.com/p/prettytable/

Cool!

Sorry for the plug, but this gawk program does something similar:

https://github.com/joepvd/table

Field splitting can be defined with all of (g)awks possibilities. Features different styles, among which unicode table borders.

This is my choice for tables on Python - https://github.com/Robpol86/terminaltables. The appearance of tables is adequately configurable. The project is also actively maintained unlike some of the others.

Cool project. You might be able to use Hypothesis (https://hypothesis.readthedocs.org/en/master/) for testing this to make sure you catch all of the little edge cases.

Incredible how everyone in this thread has a different opinion on what is the best python library that works with table.

Judging by this thread there are a surprising number of tools dedicated to this. Typically when I need tabular output I stick the data into a Pandas dataframe and its output format is usually good enough.

Suggest a move to "Show HN"

If anyone interested in similar library in C language, take a look at my simple libTprint library: https://github.com/wizzard/libtprint Hope it helps!

For Rubyists: https://github.com/geemus/formatador

csvlook [0] is another great tool that does this for any CSV file. It's part of the very useful csvkit[1] suite of command line utilities for working with CSV files.

[0] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/scripts/csvlook.html

[1] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

I've tried several of similar libraries, and still find `tabulate` the best.

This recalls some of the table formatting and exporting magic one can easily achieve with emacs org-mode. http://orgmode.org/guide/Tables.html And there, if you like, you can include a full set of spreadsheet operations.

To do this, I would just tab-delimit stdout and pipe through `column -t`. Though I can see how a dedicated lib would be better for some use cases.