# gridtables
Parser for reStructuredText-style grid tables.
This package provides a parser for plain-text representations of
tables, like the one given below.
```
+---------------------+-----------------------+
| Location | Temperature 1961-1990 |
| | in degree Celsius |
| +-------+-------+-------+
| | min | mean | max |
+=====================+=======+=======+=======+
| Antarctica | -89.2 | N/A | 19.8 |
+---------------------+-------+-------+-------+
| Earth | -89.2 | 14 | 56.7 |
+---------------------+-------+-------+-------+
```
## Character widths
The tables are intended to look good when viewed in a monospace
font. Therefore, wide and full-width characters, as those in East
Asian scripts, are counted as two characters, while zero-width and
combining characters are treated as if they have no width.
## Column alignments
The parser re-implements a table extensions from John MacFarlane's
pandoc, namely support for column-wide cell alignments. The
alignment of cells is determined by placing colons in the row that
separates the table head from the body, like so:
+------+--------+-------+
| left | center | right |
+:=====+:======:+======:+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+------+--------+-------+
The first line must be used for headless tables:
+:-----+:------:+------:+
| left | center | right |
+------+--------+-------+
| a 1 | b 2 | c 3 |
+------+--------+-------+
## Table Foot
This library implements an extension that enables to create tables
with table foots: If the *last* separator line is a part
separator, i.e., if it consists of `=` instead of `-`, then all
rows after the *second-to-last* part separator are treated as the
table foot.
E.g., consider the following table:
+------+-------+
| Item | Price |
+======+=======+
| Eggs | 5£ |
+------+-------+
| Spam | 3£ |
+======+=======+
| Sum | 8£ |
+======+=======+
Here, the last row, containing "Sum" and "8£", would be the table
foot.
## Algorithm
The cell tracing algorithm used in this package has been
translated from the original Python implementation for
reStructuredText. The parser has been placed in the public domain.
## Usage
The usual way to use this package will be to use it as part of a
parsec parser:
``` haskell
main :: IO ()
main = do
let gt = T.unlines
[ "+------+--------+-------+"
, "| left | center | right |"
, "+:=====+:======:+======:+"
, "| 1 | 2 | 3 |"
, "+------+--------+-------+"
]
in print (runParser GT.gridTable () "table" gt)
```
Use `traceLines :: [Text] -> Maybe (GridTable [Text])`, if the
table's raw lines have been retrieved in a different way.