@zemnmez/tabwriter

Format tab-separated text into aligned columns using elastic tabstops. The formatter is a pure function and works with strings without performing I/O.

npm install @zemnmez/tabwriter

import { elasticTabstops } from '@zemnmez/tabwriter';

const table = elasticTabstops('name\tcount\napple\t3\npear\t12\n');
// name  count
// apple 3
// pear  12

elasticTabstops(input, options?) returns the formatted string. Column widths are measured in Unicode code points, rather than terminal display cells. ANSI escape sequences and HTML entities receive no special handling.

Options include minWidth (minimum column width including padding), padding (extra space after a cell, default 1), padChar (default a space), alignRight, and debug (insert column separators). For tab padding, use padChar: '\t' and tabWidth (default 4). tabIndent also selects tab padding.

Both horizontal and vertical tabs delimit cells. Newlines and form feeds delimit rows. The current implementation treats vertical tabs as horizontal tabs and form feeds as newlines; it does not implement Go tabwriter's escape handling, soft-column removal, or form-feed block separation.