How could I use newline characters?

[destec]

I want to start a new line in a single cell, so I tried to add '\r\n' or '\n' at the end of the line. But it seems like it will be forbidden because of the regex test in validateData.js line 58: /[\x01-\x1A]/.test(cell). So is there any way to have a new line?

[gajus]

How is the output supposed to look?

[gajus]

I am writing V3 at the moment. This sounds like a breaking change. Therefore, it would be a good time to contribute thoughts about newline character support.

[gajus]

I was thinking more of this and I cannot see a valid use case for a newline character in the context of a tabular data. If you can provide an example, I will add this for future consideration.

[destec]

Thanks for your concern @gajus . What I really need is to have multiple line in one cell for some reason. A bad code was like

var element1 = "a single line works perfect"
var element2 = "the first line \r\n  the second line \r\n  the third line"

var data = [[1, 2], [element1, element2]];

console.log(table(data));

As you can see, in the variable element2 I want to split the content into three lines and I used \r\n as the symbol but it would have an error just I wrote before. And below is what I think it would look like:

1	2
a single line works perfect	the first line the second line the third line

[gajus]

There is no way to force a new line other than restricting the column width. As a simple workaround, I suggest to simply replace all instances of newline with a custom character that would visually indicate a line break, e.g. literal \n.

[gajus]

Since @shellscape has brought this up again:

I don't remember the reason for not supporting a new line character. As far as I remember, my reasoning was that this is a fairly edge case requirement and it would introduce a considerable level of code complexity to support it without running into edge cases.

[shellscape]

haha "hellscape" that sounds ominous. I don't think it's as edge-casey as it might seem. Aside from text-table, nearly every other table-printing module out there supports it. I was drawn in by the simple use and setup of table. The alternative is to add rows with empty cells to fake a line break in a particular cell, and that's mighty hacky.

[gajus]

Sorry, copy-paste failure. :-)

I am certainly open to a PR.

[fogine]

Another use case would be pretty-printing json schema into one of the columns, eg:

type	schema
text	{ prop: { \n prop2: 'value', \n prop3: 'value' \n } \n }

In my case the schema is more complex with custom syntax highlighting. It does not make sense to transform it into another table.

[rix0rrr]

I will second a feature request for this. Lack of this feature is a deal breaker for me.

I was thinking more of this and I cannot see a valid use case for a newline character in the context of a tabular data

Well it might turn out that your users have different use cases than you can imagine. In my case, I want to show structured complex data in each cell (lists of strings => newline separated strings, JSON => pretty-printed JSON).

You might want to put a disclaimer at the top of the description that is this library is explicitly not intended for use cases where you want to show something more than single scalar value in a cell.

[gajus]

I will second a feature request for this. Lack of this feature is a deal breaker for me.

Please contribute if this feature is important for you.

[rix0rrr]

Fair enough request. I notice myself sounding like an entitled internet person, sorry for that.

In the mean time I've found a different library that does what I want, so I'm good :). Thanks for the response though.

[rix0rrr]

Ha, turns out I settled on cli-table, the thing you originally forked!

Automattic/cli-table#79

[gajus]

table is not a fork of cli-table.

Glad you found whats working for you though.