HXTABLETRANS(1)

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✨ hxtabletrans ✨

okay bestie, so this is hxtabletrans, and it lives in the HTML-XML-utils family 💖 it's the little icon that flips your tables so you don't have to do it by hand like a Victorian child. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, let's go.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

hxtabletrans [ -c ] [ -x ] [ -v ] [ file-or-URL ]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the vibe. hxtabletrans reads an HTML or XHTML file — and yes, a fragment counts too, we're not picky — finds the first <table> element in there, and then prints that element back out with the rows and columns transposed. rows become columns. columns become rows. it's giving rotation. it's giving main character geometry ✨

now the sad part 😭 any grouping of rows you had going on with <thead>, <tbody> or <tfoot>? lost. gone. not surviving the flip. also, any comments that live outside the cells get dropped too. rip to those, fr fr 💀

💅 OPTIONS 💅

here's what you can hand her:

  • -c — this one's lowkey the cutest. it also tries to transpose the contents of the cells. so if a cell is made up of nothing but horizontal or vertical arrows and ellipses (mark-up and whitespace don't count, they're just vibing in the background), then those arrows and ellipses get swapped for their transposed counterparts. like, a right arrow becomes a down arrow. obsessed 🫶
  • -x — XML syntax mode, bestie. empty elements get written with a slash (/) at the end, e.g.: <br/>
  • -v — prints the version number and then dips. exit, stage left 👑

💀 BUGS 💀

okay so we have to be honest here, no cap. hxtabletrans should check for rows that have fewer cells than the longest row — and yes, that means taking into account the effect of the colspan and rowspan attributes — and it should create the omitted cells. but it currently doesn't. so tables with rows of unequal length may not get transposed correctly. that's just the reality of it 🙈

also: nested tables are not transposed. not even a little. periodt.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

(nothing extra here, she's an independent queen 💜)

and that's the whole page, bestie! this one's from the HTML-XML-utils crew, running version 7.x, dated 10 Jul 2011 🎀 — oldie but a goodie, and honestly? iconic. go transpose something. slay 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from