I have a large, sorted, CSV file arranged along these lines:

Desk,Left-Drawer,Paperclips
Desk,Left-Drawer,Pens
Desk,Right-Drawer,Ruler
Filing-Cabinet,Top-Drawer,Files

[download]

To make it more human-readable, I would like to pretty-print it so that column entries are omitted if they duplicate the one above. The desired output would be something like this:

Desk           | Left-Drawer  | Paperclips
               |              | Pens
               | Right-Drawer | Ruler
Filing-Cabinet | Top-Drawer   | Files

[download]

One way of doing this would be to build the table line-by-line, testing if $column_one_value == $last_column_one_value and blanking it if necessary. However, as the number of columns increases, this becomes increasingly ugly.

I was therefore wondering if there were any modules which would help? I’ve been looking through Text::ASCIITable, Text::Table and the like and several of the List ones, but without success. Does anyone know of a nicer way of doing this than looping through and testing for previous values?

Many thanks!

In reply to Pretty-Print Table (Omitting Duplicates) by Anonymous Monk

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