inline_table - Embedded text tables in Python code

inline_table is a Python module for embedding text tables into source-code.

Table is a useful notation. It is simple and easy to read. We create many tables as design works: decision tables, state transition tables, etc.

We cannot, however, write tables directly with programming languages. We manually convert tables into code with if-statements. Manual operation often causes mistakes. If-statements loss the readability. We need to reconstruct tables when we read the source-code.

We should be able to write code as a document. The inline_table module allows us to do this.

Example

inline_table compiles a text table to a Table object. We can query a row in the table. The follow is an example:

>>> import inline_table
>>> text = '''
... ============ ======== ==========
... age (cond)   gender   call (str)
... ============ ======== ==========
...  0 <= a < 2   *       baby
...  2 <= a < 7   *       kid
...  7 <= a < 18  M       boy
...  7 <= a < 16  F       girl
... 18 <= a       M       gentleman
... 16 <= a       F       lady
...       *       *       man
... ============ ======== ==========
... '''
>>> table = inline_table.compile(text, M='male', F='female')
>>> table.select(age=24, gender='female')
Tuple(age=24, gender='female', call='lady')

See the API reference for the detail of the usage.

Installation

We can install the package with the following command:

$ python setup.py install

Testing

We can run unit-tests with the following command:

$ python setup.py test

Requirements

Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2 or later
docutils package 0.13 or later

License