How can I use the *nix column utility with color codes?

Question

I have data in a csv file. I wrote a script that cats this file and uses column -s, -t to nicely tabularize it into nice columns:

Foosballs  Barbells  Bazketballs
22         39        14
86         94        37
17         44        28

However, I'd like to display the header row in bold. I can do that by writing the format codes directly to the file.

bold=$(tput bold)
reset=$(tput sgr0)
echo "${bold}Foosballs,Barbells,Bazketballs${reset}" > /path/to/file

This works fine with cat; the format codes are displayed correctly when I cat the file. But they screw up column -t: any colored/bolded row is no longer aligned with the other rows.

Foosballs  Barbells  Bazketballs
22            39        14
86            94        37
17            44        28

Is there some way to get column -t to ignore color codes when lining up data into columns? (Or is there a better way to display csv data in columns?)

UPDATE:

Applying column first and the format codes second will work, as some answers point out. But in many cases I want to apply different formats/colors to individual values in the row, not to the entire row. Here's a simple example:

echo "${underline}foo${reset}  ${underline}bar${reset}"

In general, I might want to use arbitrary formatting logic that's difficult or impossible to apply post-hoc (i.e., after I've already printed the line and called column -t on it). Formatting after tabularizing (as in Charles Duffy's answer) is a great start but may not always work for me (at least, conveniently).

I could always write a utility to do this format-code-transparent tabularization myself, but then I'd have to bring that with me wherever I work. I don't want to have to know column widths in advance; I need something like column -t I can throw on the end of a pipe with arbitrary delimited data. Basically, I need a clever one-liner or a third-party util that's readily available via Homebrew or other package managers.

To sum up: For the bounty, I'm looking for a simple, (reasonably) portable method to tabularize previously-formatted data.

Answer 1

One mechanism to enforce alignment and inject color codes is to use printf:

printf '%s%-20s %-20s %-20s%s\n' "$bold" "Foosballs" "Barbells" "Bazketballs" "$reset"

Note that we're using %s placeholders for the color codes, and strings like %-20s (20 characters, left-aligned) for the other fields. This does mean that your code needs to be responsible for knowing the desired length for each column.

---

If you don't want to do that, you can postprocess:

generate_data() {
  echo "Foosballs,Barbells,Bazketballs"
  echo 22,39,14
  echo 86,94,28
  echo 17,44,28
}

bold=$(tput bold)
reset=$(tput sgr0)

generate_data | column -s, -t | {
  IFS= read -r header                     # read first line
  printf '%s\n' "${bold}$header${reset}"  # write first line in bold
  cat                                     # pass rest of stream through unmodified
}

Or, to color just one column:

generate_data() { printf '%s\n' "Foosballs,Barbells,Bazketballs" 22,39,14 86,94,28 17,44,28; }

color_column() {
  gawk -v column_nr="$1" -v color_start="$2" -v color_end="$3" '
    BEGIN { FPAT = "([[:space:]]*[^[:space:]]+)"; }
    { $column_nr = color_start $column_nr color_end; print $0 }
  '
}
generate_data | column -s, -t | color_column 2 "$(tput bold)" "$(tput sgr0)"

Answer 2

For this test file:

$ cat file
Foosballs,Barbells,Bazketballs
22,39,14
86,94,28

The simple way:

d='\e[0m'  #default env
r='\e[31m' #red   color

printf "$r"; column -s, -t file; printf "$d"

More complicated with different color for each column:

s=','       #delimiter
d='\\e[0m'  #default env
r='\\e[31m' #red   color
g='\\e[32m' #green color
b='\\e[34m' #blue  color

echo -e "$(
awk  -F $s     \
     -v s="$s" \
     -v d="$d" \
     -v r="$r" \
     -v g="$g" \
     -v b="$b" \
     '{ print  r $1 s g $2 s b $3 d }' file | column -s$s -t
)"

And to make header bold, just add this code \e[1m to the echo command like this:

...
B='\e[1m'

echo -e "$B$(
awk  -F "$s" \
...
)"