mjhjmtu

Sometimes, I'm getting as an input tab separated list, which is not quite aligned, for instance

var1 var2 var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

Is there an easy way to render them aligned?

var1 var2 var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

So, the answer becomes:

column -t file_name

Note that this splits columns at any whitespace, not just tabs. If you want to split on tabs only, use:

column -t -s $'t' -n file_name

The -s $'t' sets the delimiter to tabs only and -n preserves empty columns (adjacent tabs).

P.S.: Just want to point out that the credit goes to Alex as well. The original hint was provided by him as a comment to the question, but was never posted as an answer.

Here's a script to do it:

aligntabs.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $delim = 's*ts*';

my %length = ();
my @lines = ();
for my $line (<>) 
 chomp $line;
 my @words = split $delim, $line;
 my $numwords = scalar(@words);
 for my $i (0..$numwords-1) 
 my $maxlen = $length$i // 0;
 my $thislen = length($words[$i]);
 $maxlen = ($thislen > $maxlen)? $thislen: $maxlen;
 $length$i = $maxlen;
 
 push @lines, [@words];


foreach my $wordsref (@lines) 
 my @words = @$wordsref;
 my $numwords = scalar(@words);
 for my $i (0..$numwords-1) 
 if ($i < $numwords-1) 
 my $fieldlen = $length$i;
 printf "%-$fieldlens ", $words[$i];
 
 else 
 print $words[$i];
 
 
 print "n";

usage

$ aligntabs.pl < infile
var1 var2 var3
var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

For manual tab stops: expand -t 42,48

For automatic tab stops, as suggested by alex: column -t

(expand is on all POSIX systems. column is a BSD utility, available in many Linux distributions as well.)

Following on from Peter.O's comment which is what I wanted to align (tab delimited data, TSV), this phrase works very nicely:

column -t -s $'t' /Users/me/data.csv | less --chop-long-lines

sed 's/||/| |/g;s/||/| |/g' filename-here | column -s"|" -t | less -#2 -N -S

Explanation:

Sed will add a space between blank delimters

Column will add equal spacing between the columns

zydsld|asl|asd
das|aosdk|dd

becomes

zydsld|asl |asd
das |aosdk|dd 

Less will open the output in a file viewer. -N and -S will add line number and disable wrapping respectively