File Command Examples

Here are practical examples demonstrating how to use tabtomd with the file command to convert tab-delimited files into Markdown tables.

Convert a tab-delimited file to a Markdown table and print it to the screen

Suppose you have a tab-delimited file, characters.tsv, containing the following text:

Name	Species	Gender
Ariel	Mermaid	Female
Sebastian	Crab	Male
Chef Louis	Human	Male
Prince Eric	Human	Male
Ursula	Octopus	Female

To convert this file to a Markdown table and print the result to the screen, use the file command and the --print flag:

tabtomd file characters.tsv --print

tabtomd reads the tab-delimited content from the file, treats the first row as a header, and outputs the following Markdown table:

| Name | Species | Gender |
| ----- | ----- | ----- |
| Ariel | Mermaid | Female |
| Sebastian | Crab | Male |
| Chef Louis | Human | Male |
| Prince Eric | Human | Male |
| Ursula | Octopus | Female |

Convert a tab-delimited file to an aligned Markdown table and print it to the screen

To produce a neatly aligned Markdown table with evenly spaced columns, use the --pretty flag along with the --print flag:

tabtomd file characters.tsv --pretty --print

This generates a table with aligned columns, as shown below:

| Name        | Species | Gender |
| ----------- | ------- | ------ |
| Ariel       | Mermaid | Female |
| Sebastian   | Crab    | Male   |
| Chef Louis  | Human   | Male   |
| Prince Eric | Human   | Male   |
| Ursula      | Octopus | Female |

Convert a tab-delimited file to an aligned Markdown table and save it to a file

To save the converted table to a file instead of printing it to the screen, use the --output flag. When this flag is used, the output is redirected to the specified file.

For example:

tabtomd file characters.tsv --output characters.md --pretty

This creates a new file, characters.md, containing the aligned Markdown table. To verify, you can view the file’s content:

cat characters.md

Output:

| Name        | Species | Gender |
| ----------- | ------- | ------ |
| Ariel       | Mermaid | Female |
| Sebastian   | Crab    | Male   |
| Chef Louis  | Human   | Male   |
| Prince Eric | Human   | Male   |
| Ursula      | Octopus | Female |

These examples showcase how tabtomd simplifies the conversion of tab-delimited data into Markdown format, whether you need to display the results immediately or save them for later use. Using the --pretty flag ensures the output is well-aligned for improved readability.