csvbox

Print a CSV file as a clean box-drawn table in the terminal. One file, standard library only.

$ python csvbox.py examples/data.csv
┌───────┬─────┬──────────────────┐
│ Name  │ Age │ City             │
├───────┼─────┼──────────────────┤
│ Alice │ 30  │ Moscow           │
│ Bob   │ 25  │ Saint Petersburg │
└───────┴─────┴──────────────────┘

Install

Python 3.8 or newer.

pip install csvbox

This adds the csvbox command:

csvbox examples/data.csv

Or skip installing entirely and run it from the source tree:

python csvbox.py examples/data.csv

Usage

The table goes to stdout, so it can be piped or saved:

csvbox examples/data.csv > table.txt

How it behaves:

• the first CSV row becomes the header, separated by a rule;
• every column is as wide as its longest value;
• short rows are padded with empty cells, long rows are cut and reported on stderr;
• files are read as UTF-8, so Cyrillic and other non-ASCII text works;
• a header-only file is drawn without the middle rule.

Errors

No tracebacks: one readable message and exit code 1.

Running the script without a path prints the usual argparse usage hint. That is expected behaviour, not a converter error.

Limitations

• BOM. CSV files saved by Excel as "CSV UTF-8" start with a byte order mark, and the first header keeps an invisible \ufeff. If you need those, change encoding="utf-8" to encoding="utf-8-sig" in read_csv.
• | inside a cell is printed as is: this is a terminal table, not Markdown.
• Box drawing on Windows. Output is Unicode. Redirecting to a file from a legacy console may need PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8.

Development

pip install pytest
pytest

Layout:

csvbox.py              # all the code: read_csv, rule, row_line, to_table, main
tests/test_csvbox.py   # tests
examples/              # sample inputs

License

MIT — see LICENSE.