tablizer - Manipulate tabular output of other programs
Usage:
tablizer [regex,...] [file, ...] [flags]
Operational Flags:
-c, --columns string Only show the speficied columns (separated by ,)
-v, --invert-match select non-matching rows
-n, --no-numbering Disable header numbering
-N, --no-color Disable pattern highlighting
-H, --no-headers Disable headers display
-s, --separator string Custom field separator
-k, --sort-by int|name Sort by column (default: 1)
-z, --fuzzy Use fuzzy search [experimental]
-F, --filter field[!]=reg Filter given field with regex, can be used multiple times
-T, --transpose-columns string Transpose the speficied columns (separated by ,)
-R, --regex-transposer /from/to/ Apply /search/replace/ regexp to fields given in -T
Output Flags (mutually exclusive):
-X, --extended Enable extended output
-M, --markdown Enable markdown table output
-O, --orgtbl Enable org-mode table output
-S, --shell Enable shell evaluable output
-Y, --yaml Enable yaml output
-C, --csv Enable CSV output
-A, --ascii Default output mode, ascii tabular
-L, --hightlight-lines Use alternating background colors for tables
-y, --yank-columns Yank specified columns (separated by ,) to clipboard,
space separated
Sort Mode Flags (mutually exclusive):
-a, --sort-age sort according to age (duration) string
-D, --sort-desc Sort in descending order (default: ascending)
-i, --sort-numeric sort according to string numerical value
-t, --sort-time sort according to time string
Other Flags:
--completion <shell> Generate the autocompletion script for <shell>
-f, --config <file> Configuration file (default: ~/.config/tablizer/config)
-d, --debug Enable debugging
-h, --help help for tablizer
-m, --man Display manual page
-V, --version Print program version
Many programs generate tabular output. But sometimes you need to post-process these tables, you may need to remove one or more columns or you may want to filter for some pattern (See PATTERNS) or you may need the output in another program and need to parse it somehow. Standard unix tools such as awk(1), grep(1) or column(1) may help, but sometimes it's a tedious business.
Let's take the output of the tool kubectl. It contains cells with withespace and they do not separate columns by TAB characters. This is not easy to process.
You can use tablizer to do these and more things.
tablizer analyses the header fields of a table, registers the column positions of each header field and separates columns by those positions.
Without any options it reads its input from STDIN
, but you can also specify a file as a parameter. If you want to reduce the output by some regular expression, just specify it as its first parameter. You may also use the -v option to exclude all rows which match the pattern. Hence:
# read from STDIN
kubectl get pods | tablizer
# read a file
tablizer filename
# search for pattern in a file (works like grep)
tablizer regex filename
# search for pattern in STDIN
kubectl get pods | tablizer regex
The output looks like the original one but every header field will have a numer associated with it, e.g.:
NAME(1) READY(2) STATUS(3) RESTARTS(4) AGE(5)
These numbers denote the column and you can use them to specify which columns you want to have in your output (see COLUMNS:
kubectl get pods | tablizer -c1,3
You can specify the numbers in any order but output will always follow the original order.
The numbering can be suppressed by using the -n option.
By default tablizer shows a header containing the names of each column. This can be disabled using the -H option. Be aware that this only affects tabular output modes. Shell, Extended, Yaml and CSV output modes always use the column names.
By default, if a pattern has been speficied, matches will be highlighted. You can disable this behavior with the -N option.
Use the -k option to specify by which column to sort the tabular data (as in GNU sort(1)). The default sort column is the first one. You can specify column numbers or names. Column numbers start with 1, names are case insensitive. You can specify multiple columns separated by comma to sort, but the type must be the same. For example if you want to sort numerically, all columns must be numbers. If you use column numbers, then be aware, that these are the numbers before column extraction. For example if you have a table with 4 columns and specify -c4
, then only 1 column (the fourth) will be printed, however if you want to sort by this column, you'll have to specify -k4
.
The default sort order is ascending. You can change this to descending order using the option -D. The default sort order is by alphanumeric string, but there are other sort modes:
- -a --sort-age
-
Sorts duration strings like "1d4h32m51s".
- -i --sort-numeric
-
Sorts numeric fields.
- -t --sort-time
-
Sorts timestamps.
Finally the -d option enables debugging output which is mostly useful for the developer.
You can reduce the rows being displayed by using one or more regular expression patterns. The regexp language being used is the one of GOLANG, refer to the syntax cheat sheet here: https://pkg.go.dev/regexp/syntax.
If you want to read a more comprehensive documentation about the topic and have perl installed you can read it with:
perldoc perlre
Or read it online: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre. But please note that the GO regexp engine does NOT support all perl regex terms, especially look-ahead and look-behind.
If you want to supply flags to a regex, then surround it with slashes and append the flag. The following flags are supported:
i => case insensitive
! => negative match
Example for a case insensitive search:
kubectl get pods -A | tablizer "/account/i"
If you use the !
flag, then the regex match will be negated, that is, if a line in the input matches the given regex, but !
is supplied, tablizer will NOT include it in the output.
For example, here we want to get all lines matching "foo" but not "bar":
cat table | tablizer foo '/bar/!'
This would match a line "foo zorro" but not "foo bar".
The flags can also be combined.
You can also use the experimental fuzzy search feature by providing the option -z, in which case the pattern is regarded as a fuzzy search term, not a regexp.
Sometimes you want to filter by one or more columns. You can do that using the -F option. The option can be specified multiple times and has the following format:
fieldname=regexp
Fieldnames (== columns headers) are case insensitive.
If you specify more than one filter, both filters have to match (AND operation).
These field filters can also be negated:
fieldname!=regexp
If the option -v is specified, the filtering is inverted.
The parameter -c can be used to specify, which columns to display. By default tablizer numerizes the header names and these numbers can be used to specify which header to display, see example above.
However, beside numbers, you can also use regular expressions with -c, also separated by comma. And you can mix column numbers with regexps.
Lets take this table:
PID TTY TIME CMD
14001 pts/0 00:00:00 bash
42871 pts/0 00:00:00 ps
42872 pts/0 00:00:00 sed
We want to see only the CMD column and use a regex for this:
ps | tablizer -s '\s+' -c C
CMD(4)
bash
ps
tablizer
sed
where "C" is our regexp which matches CMD.
If a column specifier doesn't look like a regular expression, matching against header fields will be case insensitive. So, if you have a field with the name ID
then these will all match: -c id
, -c Id
. The same rule applies to the options -T
and -F
.
You can manipulate field contents using regular expressions. You have to tell tablizer which field[s] to operate on using the option -T
and the search/replace pattern using -R
. The number of columns and patterns must match.
A search/replace pattern consists of the following elements:
/search-regexp/replace-string/
The separator can be any valid character. Especially if you want to use a regexp containing the /
character, eg:
|search-regexp|replace-string|
Example:
cat t/testtable2
NAME DURATION
x 10
a 100
z 0
u 4
k 6
cat t/testtable2 | tablizer -T2 -R '/^\d/4/' -n
NAME DURATION
x 40
a 400
z 4
u 4
k 4
There might be cases when the tabular output of a program is way too large for your current terminal but you still need to see every column. In such cases the -o extended or -X option can be useful which enables extended mode. In this mode, each row will be printed vertically, header left, value right, aligned by the field widths. Here's an example:
kubectl get pods | ./tablizer -o extended
NAME: repldepl-7bcd8d5b64-7zq4l
READY: 1/1
STATUS: Running
RESTARTS: 1 (71m ago)
AGE: 5h28m
You can of course still use a regex to reduce the number of rows displayed.
The option -o shell can be used if the output has to be processed by the shell, it prints variable assignments for each cell, one line per row:
kubectl get pods | ./tablizer -o extended ./tablizer -o shell
NAME="repldepl-7bcd8d5b64-7zq4l" READY="1/1" STATUS="Running" RESTARTS="9 (47m ago)" AGE="4d23h"
NAME="repldepl-7bcd8d5b64-m48n8" READY="1/1" STATUS="Running" RESTARTS="9 (47m ago)" AGE="4d23h"
NAME="repldepl-7bcd8d5b64-q2bf4" READY="1/1" STATUS="Running" RESTARTS="9 (47m ago)" AGE="4d23h"
You can use this in an eval loop.
Beside normal ascii mode (the default) and extended mode there are more output modes available: orgtbl which prints an Emacs org-mode table and markdown which prints a Markdown table, yaml, which prints yaml encoding and CSV mode, which prints a comma separated value file.
You can let tablizer put fields to the clipboard using the option -y
. This best fits the use-case when the result of your filtering yields just one row. For example:
cloudctl cluster ls | tablizer -yid matchbox
If "matchbox" matches one cluster, you can immediately use the id of that cluster somewhere else and paste it. Of course, if there are multiple matches, then all id's will be put into the clipboard separated by one space.
tablizer supports certain environment variables which use can use to influence program behavior. Commandline flags have always precedence over environment variables.
- <T_NO_HEADER_NUMBERING> - disable numbering of header fields, like -n.
- <T_COLUMNS> - comma separated list of columns to output, like -c
- <NO_COLORS> - disable colorization of matches, like -N
Shell completion for command line options can be enabled by using the --completion flag. The required parameter is the name of your shell. Currently supported are: bash, zsh, fish and powershell.
Detailed instructions:
- Bash:
-
source <(tablizer --completion bash)
To load completions for each session, execute once:
# Linux: $ tablizer --completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/tablizer # macOS: $ tablizer --completion bash > $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/tablizer
- Zsh:
-
If shell completion is not already enabled in your environment, you will need to enable it. You can execute the following once:
echo "autoload -U compinit; compinit" >> ~/.zshrc
To load completions for each session, execute once:
$ tablizer --completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_tablizer"
You will need to start a new shell for this setup to take effect.
- fish:
-
tablizer --completion fish | source
To load completions for each session, execute once:
tablizer --completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/tablizer.fish
- PowerShell:
-
tablizer --completion powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression
To load completions for every new session, run:
tablizer --completion powershell > tablizer.ps1
and source this file from your PowerShell profile.
YOu can put certain configuration values into a configuration file in HCL format. By default tablizer looks for $HOME/.config/tablizer/config
, but you can provide one using the parameter -f
.
In the configuration the following variables can be defined:
BG = "lightGreen"
FG = "white"
HighlightBG = "lightGreen"
HighlightFG = "white"
NoHighlightBG = "white"
NoHighlightFG = "lightGreen"
HighlightHdrBG = "red"
HighlightHdrFG = "white"
The following color definitions are available:
black, blue, cyan, darkGray, default, green, lightBlue, lightCyan, lightGreen, lightMagenta, lightRed, lightWhite, lightYellow, magenta, red, white, yellow
The Variables FG and BG are being used to highlight matches. The other *FG and *BG variables are for colored table output (enabled with the -L
parameter).
Colorization can be turned off completely either by setting the parameter -N
or the environment variable NO_COLOR to a true value.
In order to report a bug, unexpected behavior, feature requests or to submit a patch, please open an issue on github: https://github.com/TLINDEN/tablizer/issues.
This software is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3.
Copyright (c) 2022-2024 by Thomas von Dein
This software uses the following GO modules:
- repr (https://github.com/alecthomas/repr)
-
Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2016 Alec Thomas
- cobra (https://github.com/spf13/cobra)
-
Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Copyright 2013-2022 The Cobra Authors
- dateparse (github.com/araddon/dateparse)
-
Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2015-2017 Aaron Raddon
- color (github.com/gookit/color)
-
Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2016 inhere
- tablewriter (github.com/olekukonko/tablewriter)
-
Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 201 by Oleku Konko
- yaml (gopkg.in/yaml.v3)
-
Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2006-2011 Kirill Simonov
Thomas von Dein tom AT vondein DOT org