command to layout tab separated list nicely

Sometimes, I’m getting as an input tab separated list, which is not quite aligned, for instance

var1  var2  var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment  var2 var3

Is there an easy way to render them aligned?

var1                                      var2  var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment  var2  var3

Answers:

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Method 1

So, the answer becomes:

column -t file_name

Note that this splits columns at any whitespace, not just tabs. If you want to split on tabs only, use:

column -t -s $'t' -n file_name

The -s $'t' sets the delimiter to tabs only and -n preserves empty columns (adjacent tabs).

P.S.: Just want to point out that the credit goes to Alex as well. The original hint was provided by him as a comment to the question, but was never posted as an answer.

Method 2

For manual tab stops: expand -t 42,48

For automatic tab stops, as suggested by alex: column -t

(expand is on all POSIX systems. column is a BSD utility, available in many Linux distributions as well, thanks to util-linux.)

Method 3

Here’s a script to do it:

aligntabs.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $delim = 's*ts*';

my %length = ();
my @lines = ();
for my $line (<>) {
    chomp $line;
    my @words = split $delim, $line;
    my $numwords = scalar(@words);
    for my $i (0..$numwords-1) {
        my $maxlen = $length{$i} // 0;
        my $thislen = length($words[$i]);
        $maxlen = ($thislen > $maxlen)? $thislen: $maxlen;
        $length{$i} = $maxlen;
    }
    push @lines, [@words];
}

foreach my $wordsref (@lines) {
    my @words = @$wordsref;
    my $numwords = scalar(@words);
    for my $i (0..$numwords-1) {
        if ($i < $numwords-1) {
            my $fieldlen = $length{$i};
            printf "%-${fieldlen}s ", $words[$i];
        }
        else {
            print $words[$i];
        }
    }
    print "n";
}

usage

$ aligntabs.pl < infile
var1                                     var2 var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

Method 4

Following on from Peter.O’s comment which is what I wanted to align (tab delimited data, TSV), this phrase works very nicely:

column -t -s $'t' /Users/me/data.csv | less --chop-long-lines

Method 5

sed 's/||/| |/g;s/||/| |/g' filename-here | column -s"|" -t | less -#2 -N -S

Explanation:

Sed will add a space between blank delimters

Column will add equal spacing between the columns

zydsld|asl|asd
das|aosdk|dd

becomes

zydsld|asl  |asd
das   |aosdk|dd

Less will open the output in a file viewer. -N and -S will add line number and disable wrapping respectively

Method 6

With Miller (http://johnkerl.org/miller/doc) you have pretty print output.

Run

mlr --inidx --ifs "t" --opprint cat input | tail -n +2

to have

var1                                     var2 var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0