Description

This RFC proposes adding support for displaying tabular data in the REPL. Possible signature:

table( data[, n] )

It could work in a manner similar to head/tail, where, if n > 0, show the first n rows, and, if n < 0, show the last n rows.

The function could also support options, such as maximum cell width (e.g., to enforce showing abbreviated cell contents (such as truncating long strings)).

If data is an array of objects, could use keys as headers. Otherwise, if array of arrays, could support providing a list of headers.

Related Issues

No.

Questions

• Generating ASCII tables is likely to be applicable beyond just the REPL. So one question is whether the implementation for ASCII tables should live outside the REPL (e.g., in @stdlib/plot/ascii/table or similar) and then the REPL would just use that package for displaying tabular data? This probably makes sense, and we'd just need to define the API surface of the ASCII table package.
• We should also support ndarray data.

Other

ASCII tables are fairly common, so prior art should be relatively easy to find. For example,

• https://github.com/tecfu/tty-table
• https://github.com/sorensen/ascii-table

Checklist

• I have read and understood the Code of Conduct.
• Searched for existing issues and pull requests.
• The issue name begins with RFC:.