Smooth Tables

A module to generate tables and panels with box drawing borders.

About

This module will accept a list (or tuple) of lists (or tuples) and generate a text table with box drawing borders and flexible alignment options, such as the following:

┌─────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────┐
│  #  │                  Lorem Ipsum                  │  Huh? │
╞═════╪═══════════════════════════════════════════════╪═══════╡
│     │ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur       │       │
│     │ adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor        │       │
│   1 │ incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.  │ Start │
│     │ Vel pharetra vel turpis nunc eget lorem dolor │       │
│     │ sed viverra.                                  │       │
├─────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│     │ In pellentesque massa placerat duis ultricies │       │
│     │ lacus sed turpis tincidunt. Ultricies         │       │
│   2 │ tristique nulla aliquet enim tortor at auctor │   ?   │
│     │ urna. Morbi tristique senectus et netus et    │       │
│     │ malesuada. Eget lorem dolor sed viverra.      │       │
├─────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│   3 │ Amet est placerat in egestas erat.            │  ?!!  │
├─────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│     │ Integer feugiat scelerisque varius morbi      │       │
│ 999 │ enim. Risus nullam eget felis eget nunc       │  End  │
│     │ lobortis. At elementum eu facilisis sed odio  │       │
│     │ morbi quis. Ut aliquam purus sit amet luctus. │       │
└─────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────┘

or:

┌───────────┬───────────┬───────────┬──────────┬───────┐
│  Column 1 │  Column 2 │  Column 3 │ Column 4 │ Colum │
╞═══════════╪═══════════╪═══════════╪══════════╪═══════╡
│ Value 1.1 │ Value 1.2 │ Value 1.3 │   Yes    │ True  │
│ Value 2.1 │ Value 2.2 │ Value 2.3 │    No    │ True  │
│ Value 3.1 │ Value 3.2 │ Value 3.3 │   Yes    │ False │
│ Value 4.1 │ Value 4.2 │ Value 4.3 │    No    │ False │
│ Value 5.1 │ Value 5.2 │ Value 5.3 │  Maybe   │ True? │
└───────────┴───────────┴───────────┴──────────┴───────┘

It can also take a list of two-item (key/value) lists or tuples and render it in tabular format as a Panel:

                      ╭────────────────────────────────╮
         Album Title: │ Moment                         │
                      ├────────────────────────────────┤
              Artist: │ Dark Tranquillity              │
                      ├────────────────────────────────┤
        Release Date: │ 20 November 2020               │
                      ├────────────────────────────────┤
               Label: │ Century Media                  │
                      ├────────────────────────────────┤
       Track Listing: │  1. Phantom Days               │
                      │  2. Transient                  │
                      │  3. Identical to None          │
                      │  4. The Dark Unbroken          │
                      │  5. Remain in the Unknown      │
                      │  6. Standstill                 │
                      │  7. Ego Deception              │
                      │  8. A Drawn Out Exit           │
                      │  9. Eyes of the World          │
                      │ 10. Failstate                  │
                      │ 11. Empires Lost to Time       │
                      │ 12. In Truth Divided           │
                      │ 13. Silence as a Force         │
                      │ 14. Time in Relativity         │
                      ├────────────────────────────────┤
Peak Chart Positions: │ SWE: 14                        │
                      │ AUT: 24                        │
                      │ FIN: 9                         │
                      │ FRA: 181                       │
                      │ GER: 17                        │
                      │ SWI: 16                        │
                      ╰────────────────────────────────╯

NOTE: Depending on the font used on your system, the box drawing characters may be displayed differently. For example, as rendered in GitHub by Google Chrome on a Windows 10 machine, the vertical lines in the examples above are not displayed as continuous, but the Cascadia Code font renders these lines as solid.

The code to generate these examples can be found among the repository's tests.

Installation

To install the module, run the following:

pip install smoothtables

Usage

Rendering Tables

To render a text table, we must first define our columns as a list of Column objects. The Column contructor accepts the following arguments:

Argument	Type	Default	Description
heading	Positional	N/A	The column heading.
width	Keyword	None	The fixed width of the column. If None, the column width will be determined by the widest row value.
fit_heading	Positional	True	If True, the column width will be such that the heading will be guaranteed to fit. If False and the column's row data values are always shorter that the heading, the latter will be truncated. Ignored if width is provided.
h_alignment	Positional	Alignment.LEFT	The horizontal alignment of the column's row data values. One of Alignment.LEFT, Alignment.CENTER and Alignment.RIGHT. Note that column headings are always centered.
v_alignment	Positional	Alignment.TOP	The vertical alignment of the column's row data values. Pertinent in cases where different columns in the same row occupy a different number of lines of text. One of Alignment.TOP, Alignment.MIDDLE and Alignment.BOTTOM.

Then we can create the Table object, whose contructor accepts the following arguments:

Argument	Type	Default	Description
columnns	Positional	N/A	The list of Column objects.
title	Keyword	None	The title of the table, to be rendered above it.
max_width	Keyword	None	The maximum width of the table, in characters. If provided and the combination of Column definitions and row data is such that this width is not achieved, the last column will be stretched out to the max_width.
include_headings	Keyword	True	Whether the headings row should be rendered.
use_row_separators	Keyword	True	Whether separators should e rendered between subsequent data rows.
column_margin	Keyword	1	The number of blank spaces to render to the left and right of data cells, as spacing from column dividers.

The data rows (a list of tuples or lists) can then be assigned to the Table object's data property, and the table printed by the print_table method.

Rendering Panels

To render a text panel, we must first instantiate a Panel object, whose contructor accepts the following arguments:

Argument	Type	Default	Description
data	Positional	N/A	A list of key/value tuples (or lists). If the value item is itself a list, the items of said list will be interpreted as individual lines in the same cell. If the value is a string containing newline characters, it will be split into a list of lines.
use_colons	Keyword	True	Whether the panel attribute labels will be suffixed by a colon (:).
label_width	Keyword	None	The width of the attribute label section, in characters. If None, the width will be determined dynamically based on the longest label.
value_width	Keyword	None	The width of the data value section, in characters. If None, the width will be determined dynamically based on the longest data value. If specified, and the data is too long, it will be automatically wrapped.
margin	Keyword	1	The number of blank spaces to render to the left and right of data value cells.

The panel can then be printed by the print_panel method.