Console table format in ruby

Question

Is there a way to output an array of arrays as a table in ruby? I'm looking for something that is useful from the console, like powershell's format-table command.

An array that would be passed could be something like:

a = [[1.23, 5, :bagels], [3.14, 7, :gravel], [8.33, 11, :saturn]]

And the output could be something like:

-----------------------
| 1.23 |  5 | bagels  |
| 3.14 |  7 | gravel  |
| 8.33 | 11 | saturn  |
-----------------------

Answer 1

You could try something like this:

a = [[1.23, 5, :bagels], [3.14, 7, :gravel], [8.33, 11, :saturn]]

bar = '-'*(a[0][0].to_s.length + 4 + a[0][1].to_s.length + 3 + a[0][2].to_s.length + 4) 

puts bar
a.each do |i|
  i.each.with_index do |j,k|
    if k == 1 && j < 10
      print "|  #{j} "
    else
      print "| #{j} "
    end
  end
  print '|'
  puts
end
puts bar

returns:

----------------------
| 1.23 |  5 | bagels |
| 3.14 |  7 | gravel |
| 8.33 | 11 | saturn |
----------------------

bar is just an estimate of how long the top and bottom dash-bar will be. In general this code checks each sub-array and prints out its elements with | in the appropriate places. The only tricky bit is the second element of each sub-array. Here we check to see if it is double digit or single digit. The print-format is different for each.

Bear in mind that this code works specifically for your example and makes a lot of assumptions. Having said that it can be easily modified to taste.