9

I'm colorizing the header of a table formatted with column -ts $'\t'

Works well without color codes, but when I add color codes to the first line column doesn't properly align the output.

Without colored output it works as expected:
printf "1\t2\t3\nasdasdasdasdasdasdasd\tqwe\tqweqwe\n" | column -ts $'\t'

But when adding color on the first line column doesn't align the text of the colored row:
printf "\e[7m1\t2\t3\e[0m\nasdasdasdasdasdasdasd\tqwe\tqweqwe\n" | column -ts $'\t'

Observed this behaviour both on Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.

Niklas Berglund
  • 225

3 Answers3

7

Yes, that's because the color codes are also being formatted by column. They are characters just like any other. Since you're already using printf though, you may as well use it to do the formatting for you:

$ printf '\e[7m%-24s%-8s%-6s\e[0m\n%-24s%-8s%-6s\n' "1" "2" "3" "asdasdasdasdasdasdasd" "qwe" "qweqwe"
1                       2       3     
asdasdasdasdasdasdasd   qwe     qweqwe

Alternatively, you can add the color codes after using column:

$ printf "1\t2\t3\nasdasdasdasdasdasdasd\tqwe\tqweqwe\n" | column -ts $'\t' | 
    sed "1{s/^/$(printf '\e[7m')/;s/$/$(printf '\e[0m')/}"
1                      2    3   # this line is colored
asdasdasdasdasdasdasd  qwe  qweqwe
terdon
  • 242,166
  • Yes they're characters, but not the tab character \t which I have specified as delimiter :) Don't want to use printf to specify length, want to create columns with column – Niklas Berglund Dec 27 '15 at 10:33
  • @NiklasBerglund yes but there's no point in using the tab since your column command removes it. – terdon Dec 27 '15 at 10:34
  • @NiklasBerglund also see updated answer. You can add the colors after using column and avoid the problem. – terdon Dec 27 '15 at 10:41
  • Thanks. I want to use column because some columns are of dynamic width. Nice idea to add colors after using column – Niklas Berglund Dec 27 '15 at 14:26
4

I imagine that column doesn't know that \e[7m is a v100 escape sequence that takes no space in the output. It seems to asssume character codes 0 to 037 octal take no space. You can get what you want by putting the initial escape sequence on a line of its own, then removing that newline from the output:

printf '\e[7m\n1\t2\t3\e[0m\nasdasdasdasdasdasdasd\tqwe\tqweqwe\n' | 
column -ts $'\t' |
sed '1{N;s/\n//}'
meuh
  • 51,383
  • Thanks! You're right. Also using colors in some columns of other rows where this newline workaround won't work, but I'll work around that with the method @terdon suggested. – Niklas Berglund Dec 27 '15 at 14:23
1

Starting with the next version v2.40 of util-linux / column will handle text containing Fe Escape sequences from ANSI escape code properly.

With this change, programs that output text with ANSI sequences will be handled correctly as in this example:

$ tput cols
108

$ echo BEFORE; ls -1 --sort=time --color=always | head -n 19 | column
BEFORE
column-test.sh  test_enosys             test_pathnames
column-pr.md                    test_mkfds              test_sha1
tests                   test_uuid_namespace     lib
ansiescape-test.txt             test_tiocsti            test_md5
column                  test_sigreceive         test_byteswap
text-utils              test_sysinfo
column-old.c                    test_strerror


$ echo REFERENCE; ls -1 --sort=time --color=never | head -n 19 | column
REFERENCE
column-test.sh          text-utils              test_tiocsti            test_sha1
column-pr.md            column-old.c            test_sigreceive         lib
tests                   test_enosys             test_sysinfo            test_md5
ansiescape-test.txt     test_mkfds              test_strerror           test_byteswap
column                  test_uuid_namespace     test_pathnames


$ echo AFTER; ls -1 --sort=time --color=always | head -n 19 | column
AFTER
column-test.sh          text-utils              test_tiocsti            test_sha1
column-pr.md            column-old.c            test_sigreceive         lib
tests                   test_enosys             test_sysinfo            test_md5
ansiescape-test.txt     test_mkfds              test_strerror           test_byteswap
column                  test_uuid_namespace     test_pathnames
AdminBee
  • 22,803
Juarez Rudsatz
  • 111