Migrate from tabulate to texttable

texttable

• texttable
• Remove tabulate from readme
• Remove no longer necessary --install-types option to install types-tabulate subs module for mypy pre-commit hook

Better tool? (was easier to develop history), available in most distributions: Debian, Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD…

---

Differences

• tabulate uses a list of lists
• texttable uses also a list of lists

To be checked, were there an other difference?

changed milestone to %0.8.0

added ~319 enhancement labels

mentioned in issue #124 (closed)

mentioned in commit 2b18f45d

changed the description

mentioned in issue #22 (closed)

changed title from Migrate from tabulate to texttable to Choose between tabulate and texttable

changed the description

changed milestone to %0.9.0

mentioned in issue #218

changed milestone to %0.10.0

changed milestone to %0.11.0

added Dep label

Since I would like to begin working on #218 (Add --full-pubkey option), I would like to know if you chose. Tabulate is used in almost every command except history.

If we have to choose, maybe we should set a list of criteria. I begin.

tl;dr : both are very similar. Good point for Tabulate is styles. Good point for texttable is max width of tables. I would search a workaround to use a max width with tabulate.

Criteria to be checked

Assign a maximum width for the table

• texttable. It is used in history, it is great on small display.
• tabulate can't. On small display, tables wrap strangely and are difficult to read. We could find a workaround, but it would be quite annoying.

multiline (#340) : what do we want ?

This (multi-line cells, both do):

+--------+--------+
|a line  |a cell  |
|another |        |
+--------+--------+

or this (to my understanding, none can. To be checked.):

+--------+--------+
|a line  | a cell |
+--------+        |
|another |        |
+--------+--------+

Format

• texttable deals with the type of data (str, int, float, exp, auto)

         text     float       exp      int     auto
        ==============================================
        abcd      67.000   6.540e+02    89   128.001
        efghijk   67.543   6.540e-01    90   1.280e+22
        lmn        0.000   5.000e-78    89   0.000
        opqrstu    0.023   5.000e+78    92   1.280e+22

• both can align float on the comma, which is nice to display monetary info. But they don't do it the same way.

tabulate :

  >>> print(tabulate([[1.2345],[123.45],[12.345],[12345],[1234.5]]))
----------
    1.2345
  123.45
   12.345
12345
 1234.5
----------

Styles

• texttable has only one style, we can choose to use only/combine headers, columns, lines, borders (see set_deco)
• tabulate has much more available styles.

note : some users include silkaj in scripts, and parse the output. Having custom characters like those used by tabulate styles is not very nice to them.

Availability in UNIX-like distributions

Available in most distribution not a problem:

• texttable
• tabulate

Lightness

difference is negligible since both are small

• tabulate: 24 kB
• texttable: 10 kB

Speed

according to tabulates propaganda, tabulate is ~2x faster than texttable.

Personal conclusion

I would like to have all the nice styles of tabulate. However, the fact that it can't deal with a fixed with is really a bad point.

I would search a workaround for table width with tabulate, and if I don't find, we should go for texttable.

changed the description

marked this issue as related to #22 (closed)

marked this issue as related to #218

OR we can use Texttable.set_chars() to get similar table styles as tabulate's "fancy-grid" (not as nice, though) :

Transactions history from:  AhRMHUxMPXSeG7qXZrE6qCdjwK9p2bu5Eqei7xAWVEDK:CWj
Current balance: 1344300.75 ĞTest, 46.73 UD ĞTest on the 2020-12-10 15:14:13
┼───────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼
│     Date      │ Issuers/Reci │   Amounts    │   Amounts    │   Comment    │
│               │    pients    │    ĞTest     │   UDĞTest    │              │
┼───────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼
│ 2020-12-07    │ 6upqFiJ6…:7x │ 300          │ 0.010        │ DEMAIN DES   │
│ 19:00:00      │ o            │              │              │ L_AUBE       │
┼───────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼

Transactions history from:  AhRMHUxMPXSeG7qXZrE6qCdjwK9p2bu5Eqei7xAWVEDK:CWj
Current balance: 1344300.75 ĞTest, 46.73 UD ĞTest on the 2020-12-10 15:16:02
┼───────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼
│     Date      │ Issuers/Reci │   Amounts    │   Amounts    │   Comment    │
│               │    pients    │    ĞTest     │   UDĞTest    │              │
┼═══════════════┼══════════════┼══════════════┼══════════════┼══════════════┼
│ 2020-12-07    │ 6upqFiJ6…:7x │ 300          │ 0.010        │ DEMAIN DES   │
│ 19:00:00      │ o            │              │              │ L_AUBE       │
┼───────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────┼