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How to tabulate JSON from stdin? #173
Description
When I run a command like this:
tabulate --format github - <<"EOF"
[
{
"column1": "data",
"column2": 123,
"column3": true,
"column4": null
},
{
"column1": "Longer string",
"column2": 123,
"column3": true,
"column4": null
}
]
EOFI expect output like this:
| column1 | column2 | column3 | column4 |
|---------------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
| data | 123 | True | |
| Longer string | 123 | True | |
Unfortunately I get output like this:
|---|------------|---------|----------|
| [ | | | |
| | { | | |
| | "column1": | "data", | |
| | "column2": | 123, | |
| | "column3": | true, | |
| | "column4": | null | |
| | }, | | |
| | { | | |
| | "column1": | "Longer | string", |
| | "column2": | 123, | |
| | "column3": | true, | |
| | "column4": | null | |
| | } | | |
| ] | | | |
In the README for the command-line utility I don't see any input format options or an expected input format.
As a library the README says tabulate supports "list or another iterable of dicts (keys as columns)". This matches my use case as it's what you would get after converting the input to via json.load
Am I missing something?
If not, would you consider supporting this use case?
Currently I use jtbl for this (kellyjonbrazil/jtbl#9) but I'd like tabulate to support it too as it has even more useful formatting options.
If it's not possible to guess the input format I'd accept something like an --input-format json similar to in2csv's --format json option.
Activity
astanin commentedon Oct 7, 2022
tabulateas a command line tool is somewhat behindtabulatethe library. In particular at the moment it handles only white-space-separated values as input, and only a subset of output formats and options. It can definitely be improved.Tatsh commentedon Apr 28, 2023
May want to use the
jqutility with its@csvfilter. I was looking to do the same but with lists of lists.Stack Overflow question
astanin commentedon Mar 9, 2026
Given the wide adoption of JSONL, it would probably be useful to add support of it in the tabulate CLI utility.
implement support of JSONL and CSV input formats in command line utility