lscolumn

Print a list of strings in columns like in ls.

Description

Two styles are available -- BSD-style and GNU-style. Let's see through example:

>>> import lscolumn
>>> lscolumn.pprint(['hello', 'hola world', 'greetings', 'hello again and again'],
...                 total_width=60, style='BSD')
hello                 greetings
hola world            hello again and again
>>> lscolumn.pprint(['hello', 'hola world', 'greetings', 'hello again and again'],
...                 total_width=60, style='GNU')
hello  hola world  greetings  hello again and again

In BSD-style, the widths of the columns are the same, whereas in GNU-style, they are different. When formatting long list, BSD-style is faster than GNU-style, but GNU-style is more compact.

CJK (wide) characters are well supported thanks to cjkjust.

Installation

pip install lscolumn

Functions and Classes

For detailed help, try help(...) in Python REPL.

• pprint(strings, total_width=None, style='BSD', file=None): print in columns the list of strings strings
• BSDFormatter: the BSD-style formatter (see example below)
• GNUFormatter: the GNU-style formatter (see example below)

Example using BSDFormatter

import lscolumn
bsd = lscolumn.BSDFormatter(total_width=80)
# print one list
bsd.pprint(['hello', 'hola world', 'greetings'])
# print another list using the same configuration
bsd.pprint(['greetings', 'hello again and again'])
# print yet another list to `outfile`
with open('filename.txt', 'w') as outfile:
    bsd.pprint(['hello', 'hola world'], file=outfile)

The same applies to GNUFormatter.