Java library for writing a table on the command line

Question

Does anybody know a library that would transform a String[][] into a String table as below?

| title1 | title2 |
|________|________|
| blah   | blih   |
| blah2  | blih2  |
etc...

I could write formatted strings for this, but it will be non-generic code, tied to the parameters. Writing generic code for this purpose would be more expensive than what I'm willing to invest.

So all in all, I think a library would be justified for this.

Any idea if this exists already?

String.format() is good, it just doesn't give the logic to calculate the width of the columns or adapt the table to different number of columns according different String[][] input. — matthieus, Dec 14 '10 at 17:54
And if library there is, I would also expect that the library takes lists of more sophisticated objects in input and serialize them in a table manner. — matthieus, Dec 14 '10 at 17:57

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

According to daniel_or_else in this thread:

Using j-text-utils you may print to console a table like:

_____________________________________________________________
| Item Num | Description           | Rating |  Cost | Price |
=============================================================
| 8675309  | Tommy Tutone Album    |      3 |  5.99 | 10.99 |
| 5619452  | Led Zeppelin Box Set  |      5 | 10.42 | 24.95 |
| 9154732  | Justin Bieber Box Set |     -1 |  0.00 |  0.00 |

And it as simple as:

TextTable tt = new TextTable(columnNames, data);
tt.printTable();

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

1

I am not aware of any library that does this, but take a look at this SO question:

Java: Print a 2D String array as a right-justified table

It shows you how you can create a generic method which dynamically-generates format strings for each column.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

Community

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answered Dec 14 '10 at 17:44

dogbane

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This is a good solution, but if a library exists, I would still like to know, as I need more formatting features in my case. Actually I'm not looking for a solution, more a library to externalize this kind of logic (if I can avoid maintaining my ugly code, I will :-)). – matthieus Dec 14 '10 at 18:07

Java library for writing a table on the command line

2 Answers2