emus - Table Compiler

emus (pronounced like the antipodean bird) is a utility for quickly constructing tables in a variety of formats.

Installing emus

emus requires Python 3 and the respective version of pip.

Install emus with the following terminal commands:

git clone https://github.com/fourohfour/emus
cd emus
pip install .

Using emus

Input

Input to emus is given in the form of .emus documents. These documents specify the data in a table in the manner shown in the example below.

"Airspeed Velocity" {
    -> African :: Laden    => "20 m/s"
    -> African :: Unladen  => "33 m/s"
    -> European:: Laden    => "16 m/s"
    -> European:: Unladen  => "28 m/s"
}

"Match Results" {
    -> John   :: "Game 1"   => 2
    -> Andrew :: "Game 1"   => 3
    -> John   :: "Game 2"   => 4
    -> Andrew :: "Game 2"   => 0
}

A table is specified with a value indicating its title and a pair of braces. Cell entries are given between the braces in the following form:

-> COL :: ROW => ENTRY

All spacing is purely aesthetic. All values including titles, row and column names, and entries, are strings. Double quotes are needed for values containing spaces or syntactical characters.

Commands

A command to emus is of the following form:

emus <input_file> (options)

The input_file should be a .emus file. The options are mainly to specify how the output should be emitted. A help option (-h or --help) can also be specified.

Emitters

All emitters can be specified with a flag and an optional output_file as shown below. If no output file is specified the output is printed to stdout.

Example: emus ./my_data.emus --txt ./output.txt

---

--md: Markdown

Markdown is a common markup language used on GitHub, StackOverflow and Reddit among other places. Although not a feature of standard markdown, many markdown implementations support tables. The --md emitter will output tables in this common form. The --markdown flag is a supported alias.

--txt: Text

This flag allows table output in an 'ascii-art' style. These tables will only display well in environments which use monospaced fonts. The --text flag is a supported alias.

---

Example Usage

Emit the file scores.emus as markdown and write to pretty-scores.md:

emus ./scores.emus --md ./pretty-scores.md

Emit the file rankings.emus as text to stdout:

emus ./rankings.emus --txt