Luke Maurits

Today I released a simple Python library that I wrote during a 3 hour train ride from Newcastle to Sydney last weekend (more on what I was doing there in a later enry!), which I’ve decided to call PrettyTable. It contains a single class of that name whose job is to make it easy to print nice-looking ASCII tables like this:

+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| City name | Area | Population | Annual Rainfall |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| Adelaide  | 1295 |  1158259   |      600.5      |
| Brisbane  | 5905 |  1857594   |      1146.4     |
| Darwin    | 112  |   120900   |      1714.7     |
| Hobart    | 1357 |   205556   |      619.5      |
| Sydney    | 2058 |  4336374   |      1214.8     |
| Melbourne | 1566 |  3806092   |      646.9      |
| Perth     | 5386 |  1554769   |      869.4      |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+

Some of you may recognise the style of table from the PostgreSQL shell psql, which was the inspiration for PrettyTable.

It’s quite a simple little piece of code (you can read about the various options at the page linked to above, and you can even see the Pydoc API – this is actually the first time I’ve used Pydoc on my own software!) but it’s also the kind of thing that I suspect will actually find use in a wide range of future projects, both of my own and hopefully of others.