Paste Command Examples

Here are practical examples demonstrating how to use tabtomd with the paste command to convert tab-delimited data from the clipboard into Markdown tables.

Convert tab-delimited text from the clipboard to a Markdown table and print it to the screen

Suppose you have copied the following tab-delimited data to the clipboard:

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

To convert this clipboard text into a Markdown table and print it to the screen, use the paste command with the --print flag:

tabtomd paste --print

tabtomd reads the tab-delimited text from the clipboard, 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 tab-delimited text from the clipboard to an aligned Markdown table and print it to the screen

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

tabtomd paste --pretty --print

This produces an aligned Markdown table as shown below:

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

Convert tab-delimited text from the clipboard 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 paste --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 demonstrate how tabtomd can easily convert tab-delimited data from the clipboard into Markdown format, offering both quick display options and the ability to save the output for later use. Using the --pretty flag ensures the results are well-aligned and visually appealing for improved readability.