I probably shouldn't have talked as much about table and data formatting. I'm writing a simple, dumb tool to browse/glance at CSV files from the terminal as quickly and effortlessly as possible. The reason I only need a generic solution (aside from its being more fun ;-) is this: My terminal is 158 characters wide; my CSV files have relatively few fields (under 15); the columns with the widest data tend to be unstructured text, where the widest cells are generally much wider than the average cell. Currently I'm browsing bank transaction files, where the Description column is the widest, and is the safest to truncate without chopping off "important" information. I indicate truncation by replacing the final character with a tilde, signaling data loss. The likelihood of my wanting to browse a CSV file having 30 columns, or on a terminal with 80 characters, where I'd have to be start narrowing the date and amount columns, is fairly remote.

I looked at Text::ANSITable but it did so much more than I needed, and didn't appear to address fitting the table width to the terminal.

In reply to Re^2: Algorithm to reduce the weight of a collection of bags by ibm1620
in thread Algorithm to reduce the weight of a collection of bags by ibm1620

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