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 std::io::Write;

use tabwriter::TabWriter;

let mut tw = TabWriter::new(vec![]); tw.write_all(b" 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();

assert_eq!(&written, " 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 clone 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 you should enable the TabWriter::ansi option. Previously this was done by enabling the crate feature ansi_formatting, but that feature is now deprecated. (If you use it, then TabWriter::ansi will be automatically enabled for you. Otherwise it is disabled by default.)

Minimum Rust version policy

This crate's minimum supported rustc version is 1.67.0.

The current policy is that the minimum Rust version required to use this crate can be increased in minor version updates. For example, if crate 1.0 requires Rust 1.20.0, then crate 1.0.z for all values of z will also require Rust 1.20.0 or newer. However, crate 1.y for y > 0 may require a newer minimum version of Rust.

In general, this crate will be conservative with respect to the minimum supported version of Rust.