Parser for generic ASCII tables.

I have a few tools I use that output their data as ASCII tables in various formats. An example would be the virsh commnad line interface:

$ virsh pool-list --all                                                                                                                                            
 Name          State    Autostart
-----------------------------------
 default       active   no
 disk-images   active   yes
 vmdisk        active   yes

The issue is that virsh alone has hundreds of commands which output different columns. Some of those commands even allow selectively hiding or including specific columns in the output.

I’d like to parse the output of these but I don’t know that it makes sense to write a parser for each one or even for each of these programs. What if we added a generic ASCII table parser instead that could handle some common output formats? As an example here’s a short Python 3 script I wrote as a first pass at this: https://github.com/CtrlC-Root/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/tj. Would something like this make sense to add to this project?

[CtrlC-Root]

This is fantastic! I’ve wanted to pick this back up but I just haven’t found the time to even respond here much less work on it. I have a script that parses virsh output well enough and I’ve just been using that but I look forward to dropping it once this is implemented.

[kellyjonbrazil]

asciitable and asciitable-m parsers have been released with jc v1.18.6