tabwriter is a crate that implements elastic tabstops. It provides both a library for wrapping Rust Writers and a small program that exposes the same functionality at the command line.

Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.

Simple example of library

```rust use tabwriter::TabWriter;

let mut tw = TabWriter::new(vec![]); tw.write_str(" Bruce Springsteen\tBorn to Run Bob Seger\tNight Moves Metallica\tBlack The Boss\tDarkness on the Edge of Town ").unwrap(); tw.flush().unwrap();

let written = String::fromutf8(tw.intoinner().unwrap()).unwrap();

asserteq!(written.asslice(), " Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Bob Seger Night Moves Metallica Black The Boss Darkness on the Edge of Town "); ```

You can see an example of real use in my CSV toolkit.

Simple example of command line utility

```bash [andrew@Liger tabwriter] cat sample | sed 's/ /\t/g' a\tb\tc abc\tmnopqrstuv\txyz abcmnoxyz\tmore text

a\tb\tc [andrew@Liger tabwriter] ./target/tabwriter < sample a b c abc mnopqrstuv xyz abcmnoxyz more text

a b c ```

Notice that once a column block is broken, alignment starts over again.

Documentation

The API is fully documented with some examples: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/tabwriter/.

Installation

This crate works with Cargo. Assuming you have Rust and Cargo installed, simply check out the source and run tests:

bash git checkout git://github.com/BurntSushi/tabwriter cd tabwriter cargo test

You can also add tabwriter as a dependency to your project's Cargo.toml:

toml [dependencies] tabwriter = "1"

Dealing with ANSI escape codes

If you want tabwriter to be aware of ANSI escape codes, then compile it with the ansi_formatting feature enabled.