xsv table has unexpected output with long input (too-wide tabs, missing tabs)

[DefaultGen]

Hi, I'm trying to use xsv 0.13.0 as a replacement for the unix column command in a script because it is much faster. However I get lines with strange spacing even with what I think is simple, although long, input.

I have a simple two column .csv like this:

title,ext
exqz3k,.md
fov1sy,.md
g421ji,.md
...

If I run cat simple_example.csv | xsv table > outputFile, I can see the following weird lines (there's a few more examples of both issues throughout the output):

83pddb  .md
z4veyi.md           (Line 14895, no space between title and ext)
3bl6ub  .md
...
qvxr41  .md
scw1ye        .md   (Line 17874, large tab between title and ext)
eti8p6  .md

With more complex data, the output errors happen much more frequently (in attached complex_example.csv, some errors start around line 1113 for example).

I can reproduce this with any sufficiently large data set. I've attached the two randomly generated data sets. I understand xsv table is probably just meant to print a few human readable lines to the terminal, so if this kind of processing isn't in scope for the project I'll stick to the venerable column :-)

I'm on Arch Linux with xsv installed from pacman. I reproduced this on Debian as well.

simple_example.csv
complex_example.csv

[DefaultGen]

As an even simpler test, I made a csv with a header, then foo,bar repeated 20,000 times:

1,2
foo,bar
foo,bar
foo,bar

The resulting xsv table output has numerous no-tab lines that say foobar. Interestingly if I remove the 1,2 header, I don't see the issue even if I repeat it 10M times.

[lespea]

You'll probably have better luck with https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv/ -- this hasn't been updated in over 6 years.

[DefaultGen]

You'll probably have better luck with https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv/ -- this hasn't been updated in over 6 years.

Thanks a lot, I hadn't found that! The qsv table command works perfect for me.

[janxkoci]

You can also try miller and its pretty-print output option 😉