============================================================

NAME

qtFormatColumns - Replace characters with spaces to form columns in text

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Parses a text file based on --delimitters, treats each segment as a columns
after padding each entry to the maximum length plus columnGap. Lines that do
not match any delimitters are ignored and passed through.

Delimitters are converted to Javascript RegExp. The characters matched by the
delimitters are stripped from the text. Use suffixes and prefixes to replace them
if needed.

delimitters, suffixes and prefixes are all coordinated lists. The segment isolated 
by the first delimitter is wrapped by the first suffix and prefix, if any.

Note: Because the original use case for this was to process BASH output, it defaults
to stripping BASH terminal color strings for measurement during alignment. It does
not yet do anything else with non-printing characters to insure correct alignment.

OPTIONS

-help, --help Prints these instructions

PARAMETERS

--delimitters default is ':\s+' (treats first colon and space as a column boundary) --prefixes defaults is empty string --suffixes default is '' --spacingString default is ' ' (space) --columnGap default is 4 (four spaces)

EXAMPLE

cat someFile.txt | qtFormatColumns --delimitters=': +',' +(' --prefixes='','','(' --suffixes=':','','' --spacingString=' ' --columnGap=4

(note backslash to escape parenthesis above.)

If someFile.txt contains:

Example... commandName: description longerCommandName: another description (with parenthesis) also: more description (and another parenthetical)

it is converted to:

Example... commandName: description longerCommandName: another description (with parenthesis) also: more description (and another parenthetical)

============================================================