Often I’ll have textual data in columnar (tab-delimited) form.

For serious manipulation, I’ll eventually copy and paste it to a spreadsheet and work with it there, but usually I don’t need to go that far.

I’ve been using this BBEdit AppleScript for years that greatly eases viewing and editing tabular data:

--  Get the input.
tell application "BBEdit"
    set input to the selection of text window 1 as text
    if input is "" then
        set input to the text of window 1
    end if
end tell

--  Break the input into rows.
set inputRows to paragraphs of input
if (count of inputRows) is 0 then error "no rows found"

--  Find the longest cell.
set maximumInputCellLength to 0
set oldTextItemDelimiters to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {tab}
--  Iterate over the rows.
repeat with inputRow in inputRows
    set inputCells to text items of inputRow
    --  Iterate over the cells in each row.
    repeat with inputCell in inputCells
        set inputCellLength to the length of inputCell
        if inputCellLength > maximumInputCellLength then ¬
            set maximumInputCellLength to inputCellLength
    end repeat
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldTextItemDelimiters

tell application "BBEdit"
    set the tab width of text window 1 to maximumInputCellLength + 1
end tell

It turns this:

Into this:

This is the important point: the script doesn’t alter the data itself. Instead, it merely finds the “widest” tab-delimited cell and sets BBEdit’s tab width to match.

Works like a charm.

bbedit applescript Dec 16 2009