tablify - a simple utility for formatting CSV files. by Daniel Lyons <fusion@storytotell.org> What it does: Tablify is a simple program which does nothing but parse CSV files and render them into various display-friendly formats. I spend a fair amount of my time dealing with data migration and sometimes it's handy to look at the data directly or publish it in such a fashion as other people may find it convenient. Tablify does not understand every possible CSV format; I took the CSV code from the book Real World Haskell. I am not particularly interested in adding support for other varieties of CSV because this parser seems to handle the common cases and generally if you are getting something else, it's because you asked for something weird. Please let me know if this is not the case for you. A major rationale for this application was that I noticed that there are some nice characters in the Unicode standard for drawing boxes. I used to draw boxes for text files like this: +--------------+-----+ | Name | Age | +--------------+-----+ | Daniel Lyons | 28 | | Reid Givens | 29 | +--------------+-----+ This works OK (it's what MySQL and PostgreSQL's command line clients do, after all.) But how much cooler does this look: ┌──────────────┬─────┐ │ name │ age │ ├──────────────┼─────┤ │ Daniel Lyons │ 28 │ │ Reid Givens │ 29 │ └──────────────┴─────┘ If you have a nice Unicode font like Menlo on your machine, that should look freaking awesome. This is what you get using the -U flag. If you want the old fugly ASCII table, use -A. Anyway, it occurred to me while writing it that I could quite easily support a few other formats, so I wrote an HTML output routine and a TBL output routine, TBL being part of troff or groff depending on your system. The HTML output routine escapes HTML entities (<, > and &). I expect if you actually use TBL you will want to tinker with what it gives you. I haven't embellished the system with any justification alternatives besides left justification; this is really only an issue for the Unicode output option. The program assumes that your input and your output are both UTF-8. There are utilities you can use such as iconv to fix files coming in or going out if that's not your situation. You may specify many files on the command line, or - if you want it to read from standard input. Enjoy! Dependencies: • GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) — http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ • utf8-string library — http://hackage.haskell.org/package/utf8-string These are generally included with GHC: • parsec • regex-compat • haskell98 Building: Run these three commands ($ represents your shell's prompt): $ runhaskell Setup.hs configure $ runhaskell Setup.hs build $ sudo runhaskell Setup.hs install Alternatively, if you have the cabal utility installed, you can run: $ cabal configure $ cabal build $ cabal install Contacting me: If you run into any bugs or think of a feature you'd like me to add, please email me at fusion@storytotell.org and tell me about it.