Author: admin

Have you ever wanted to display the contents of an array as a table in a command line script? If so, you will have no doubt realised that it takes somewhat longer than it’s html equivalent.

I needed to output some data in a tabular format from a PHP CLI script this week. MySQL does a good job of this with it’s own command line interface, so my first hope was that someone may have replicated this in a PHP function. After a fair bit of searching on Google, I still couldn’t find a suitable tool, so I decided to write my own.

Please note that it is not perfect; e.g. it will break with unpredictable results if the array you pass to it is not correctly formed. However, if you want a quick function that converts an array to a table, then this will certainly help:

<style type="text/css">

 * {font-family:courier new;}

</style>



<?



/*

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// FUNCTION: draw_text_table ($table)

// Accepts an array ($table) and returns a text table

// Array must be of the form:



$table[1]['id']       = '1';


$table[1]['make']     = 'Citroen';

$table[1]['model']    = 'Saxo';

$table[1]['version']  = '1.4 West Coast';



$table[2]['id']       = '2';

$table[2]['make']     = 'Honda';

$table[2]['model']    = 'Civic';

$table[2]['version']  = '1.6 VTi';



$table[3]['id']       = '3';


$table[3]['make']     = 'BMW';

$table[3]['model']    = '3 Series';

$table[3]['version']  = '328 Ci';



//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

*/



function draw_text_table ($table) {

    

    // Work out max lengths of each cell


    foreach ($table AS $row) {

        $cell_count = 0;

        foreach ($row AS $key=>$cell) {

            $cell_length = strlen($cell);


            $cell_count++;

            if (!isset($cell_lengths[$key]) || $cell_length > $cell_lengths[$key]) $cell_lengths[$key] = $cell_length;


        }    

    }



    // Build header bar



    $bar = '+';

    $header = '|';

    $i=0;




    foreach ($cell_lengths AS $fieldname => $length) {

        $i++;

        $bar .= str_pad('', $length+2, '-')."+";


        $name = $i.") ".$fieldname;

        if (strlen($name) > $length) {

            // crop long headings


            $name = substr($name, 0, $length-1);

        }

        $header .= ' '.str_pad($name, $length, ' ', STR_PAD_RIGHT) . " |";


    }



    $output = '';



    $output .= $bar."\n";

    $output .= $header."\n";


    $output .= $bar."\n";



    // Draw rows



    foreach ($table AS $row) {

        $output .= "|";


        foreach ($row AS $key=>$cell) {

            $output .= ' '.str_pad($cell, $cell_lengths[$key], ' ', STR_PAD_RIGHT) . " |";


        }

        $output .= "\n";

    }



    $output .= $bar."\n";



    return $output;




}



$table[1]['id']       = '1';

$table[1]['make']     = 'Citroen';


$table[1]['model']    = 'Saxo';

$table[1]['version']  = '1.4 West Coast';




$table[2]['id']          = '2';

$table[2]['make']     = 'Honda';


$table[2]['model']    = 'Civic';

$table[2]['version']  = '1.6 VTi';




$table[3]['id']          = '3';

$table[3]['make']     = 'BMW';


$table[3]['model']    = '3 Series';

$table[3]['version']  = '328 Ci';






echo 'This function takes an array like this:<br /><pre>';



var_dump($table);



echo '</pre>And converts it into a text table like this:<br /><pre>';




echo draw_text_table ($table);



echo '</pre>Handy for command line output!';



?>