How to pretty-print CSV/spreadsheet from SQuirreL results?

Question

I'm in a situation where I want to be able to take SQL query results from SQuirreL and paste them as ascii text into various forms and reports. With SQuirreL, I can export results as Excel or a CSV, but I'd like to eventually format the results in something like this format;

+---------+--------+-------+
|  header | header | header|
+---------+--------+-------+
|  value  | value  | value |
+---------+--------+-------+

I would be amazed if this hasn't been done before, but my searches for this have come up empty.

Update:

Note that I saw https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10518207/tool-to-convert-csv-data-to-stackoverflow-friendly-text-only-table , but those are all web site solutions. I'd like something I can run on the command line.

Answer 1

I ended up looking at three possible solutions, all in Perl.

All three use Text::CSV as a base, to read in the CSV.

Before I settled on a prepared Table package, I just tried doing it manually. This was straightforward, but a little tedious. I had to manually determine max field lengths and draw the required pieces. Even so, a well-spaced Perl script doing this only took 78 lines.

I then looked at the Perl Text::Table package, at http://search.cpan.org/~shlomif/Text-Table-1.131/lib/Text/Table.pm . From a very quick look, this looked like what I needed. However, what I discovered is that I really didn't understand the documentation, and the examples didn't help. I gave up on this.

I then discovered Text::ASCIITable, at http://search.cpan.org/~lunatic/Text-ASCIITable-0.20/lib/Text/ASCIITable.pm . There were enough examples showing what I needed to do so that it was easy to build the script I needed. The only problem I ran into was that the "draw()" method didn't appear to work (did nothing), although just "print $table" worked fine. The resulting solution was only 31 lines long.

This is the entire script:

#! /bin/perl
use strict;
use Text::CSV;
use Text::ASCIITable;

my $csv = Text::CSV->new();
my $filename = shift @ARGV;
my $fh;
if (defined $filename) {
    open $fh, "<$filename";
}
else {
    $fh = *STDIN;
}

my $asciitable  = Text::ASCIITable->new();
$asciitable->setOptions('reportErrors', 1);

my $firstRow = $csv->getline($fh);
my @firstRowFields = @$firstRow;
my $numColumns = $#firstRowFields + 1;

$asciitable->setCols(@firstRowFields);

while (my $row = $csv->getline($fh)) {
    $asciitable->addRow($row);
}

print $asciitable;

exit(0);