HTML table to “graphical text” for code comments

Question

Is there a tool (ideally command-line-based) that can help in converting the source to HTML tables into “graphical text” (think perhaps ASCII art for HTML tables) for use in code comments, as show below?

For example, given the following HTML table source

<TABLE BORDER=1>
  <CAPTION>A test table with merged cells</CAPTION>
  <TR><TH ROWSPAN=2><TH COLSPAN=2>Average
  <TH ROWSPAN=2>other<BR>category<TH>Misc
  <TR><TH>height<TH>weight
  <TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT>males<TD>1.9<TD>0.003
  <TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT ROWSPAN=2>females<TD>1.7<TD>0.002
</TABLE>

the tool would output something like the following to be embedded into code comments (like /*…*/):

/*
          A test table with merged cells
+----------+-------------------+----------+--------+ 
|          |      Average      |  other   |  Misc  |
|          +---------+---------+ category +--------|
|          |  height |  weight |          |        |
|----------+---------+---------+----------+--------|
| males    |   1.9   |  0.003  |          |        |
|----------+---------+---------+----------+--------|
| females  |   1.7   |  0.002  |          |        |
+----------+---------+---------+----------+--------+
*/

Background: A piece of code that reads values from HTML tables can be annotated with comments depicting text-based graphical representations of complex HTML table layouts. Someone maintaining the code later can then find it easier to understand, for example, how a piece of code is slicing and dicing an HTML table or plucking values at certain cell positions.

Answer 1

I don't know which language are you talking about but I use this function (PHP) for that:

function text_table($data)
{
    $keys = array_keys(end($data));
    $size = array_map('strlen', $keys);

    foreach(array_map('array_values', $data) as $e)
        $size = array_map('max', $size,
            array_map('strlen', $e));

    foreach($size as $n) {
        $form[] = "%-{$n}s";
        $line[] = str_repeat('-', $n);
    }

    $form = '| ' . implode(' | ', $form) . " |\n";
    $line = '+-' . implode('-+-', $line) . "-+\n";
    $rows = array(vsprintf($form, $keys));

    foreach($data as $e)
        $rows[] = vsprintf($form, $e);
    return $line . implode($line, $rows) . $line;
}

Usage:

    echo "<pre>\n";
    echo text_table($array);
    echo "</pre>\n";

Answer 2

  elinks -dump 1 

http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/manpages/elinks.1.html

Answer 3

HTML::TreeBuilder plus Text::ASCIITable looks like they would need only a little glue to do the job.