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Latex Table Formatting Script

Posted Tuesday, June 11th 2013 in Other Tech - Permalink

Here is a nice, simple script that turns a newline-delimited text file of items into a Latex-format table. The script accepts four parameters. The first parameter is the file to read from. The second parameter is the file to write to. The third parameter is a integer specifying the number of columns to divide the data into. The fourth parameter is optional, and specifies whether to wrap the items in a typewriter tag.

An example of calling the script:

% ./columnize.php infile.txt outfile.txt 3 y

The script:

#!/usr/local/bin/php

<?php
// Reads a file, and columnizes it for Latex tables.
// Parameters:
// 1 - the file to read from
// 2 - the file to write to
// 3 - the number of columns to create
// 4 - wrap text in \texttt{} (y,n)  [optional]
$readfilename = $argv[1];
$writefilename = $argv[2];
$columns = $argv[3];
$typewrite = $argv[4];

$readfile = fopen($readfilename, 'r');
$writefile = fopen($writefilename, 'w');

echo "Loading from " . $readfilename . " and writing output to " . $writefilename . "\n";

if(!$readfile)
{
   echo "Unable to open file " . $readfilename . " to read";
   die;
}
if(!$writefile)
{
   echo "Unable to open file " . $writefilename . " to write";
   die;
}

$i = 1;
$rows = 0;
$pending = "";

while (!feof($readfile))
{
   if($typewrite == "y")
      $pending .= " \\texttt{" . str_replace("\n", "", fgets($readfile)) . "} ";
   else
      $pending .= str_replace("\n", "", fgets($readfile));

   if($i % $columns == 0)
   {
      $pending .= " \\\\";
      fwrite($writefile, $pending . "\n");
      $pending = "";
      $rows++;
   }
   else
      $pending .= " & ";

   $i++;
}

if($pending != "")
{
   fwrite($writefile, $pending . "\n");
   $rows++;
}

echo "Formatted " . $i . " items into " . $rows . " rows.\n";

fclose($readfile);
fclose($writefile);
?>