tabwriter is a crate that implements elastic tabstops. It provides both a library for wrapping Rust Writer
s and a small program that exposes the same functionality at the command line.
Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.
Simple example of library
use std::io::Write;
use tabwriter::TabWriter;
let mut tw = TabWriter::new(vec![]);
tw.write_all(b"
Bruce Springsteen\tBorn to Run
Bob Seger\tNight Moves
Metallica\tBlack
The Boss\tDarkness on the Edge of Town
").unwrap();
tw.flush().unwrap();
let written = String::from_utf8(tw.into_inner().unwrap()).unwrap();
assert_eq!(&written, "
Bruce Springsteen Born to Run
Bob Seger Night Moves
Metallica Black
The Boss Darkness on the Edge of Town
");
You can see an example of real use in my CSV toolkit.
Simple example of command line utility
[andrew@Liger tabwriter] cat sample | sed 's/ /\\t/g'
a\tb\tc
abc\tmnopqrstuv\txyz
abcmnoxyz\tmore text
a\tb\tc
[andrew@Liger tabwriter] ./target/tabwriter < sample
a b c
abc mnopqrstuv xyz
abcmnoxyz more text
a b c
Notice that once a column block is broken, alignment starts over again.
Documentation
The API is fully documented with some examples: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/tabwriter/.
Installation
This crate works with Cargo. Assuming you have Rust and Cargo installed, simply check out the source and run tests:
git clone git://github.com/BurntSushi/tabwriter
cd tabwriter
cargo test
You can also add tabwriter
as a dependency to your project's Cargo.toml
:
[dependencies]
tabwriter = "1"
Dealing with ANSI escape codes
If you want tabwriter
to be aware of ANSI escape codes, then compile it with the ansi_formatting
feature enabled.
Minimum Rust version policy
This crate's minimum supported rustc
version is 1.34.0
.
The current policy is that the minimum Rust version required to use this crate can be increased in minor version updates. For example, if crate 1.0
requires Rust 1.20.0, then crate 1.0.z
for all values of z
will also require Rust 1.20.0 or newer. However, crate 1.y
for y > 0
may require a newer minimum version of Rust.
In general, this crate will be conservative with respect to the minimum supported version of Rust.