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November 5, 2014

Awesome Asciidoctor: CSV and DSV Tables

With Asciidoctor we can create tables where the header and rows are in CSV (Comma Separated Values) and DSV (Delimiter Separated Values) format. Normally we use a pipe-symbol (|) to separate cell values. This is actually PSV (Prefix Separated Values) :-).

In the following Asciidoctor markup we create a very simple table with a header and two rows using CSV:

= Tables

== CSV table

[format="csv", options="header"]
|===
Writing tools, Awesomeness
Asciidoctor, Oh yeah!
MS Word, No!
|===

We generate this into HTML and we get the following result:

Asciidoctor provides also another way to define the above table:

= Tables

== CSV table

// Define table using CSV syntax. 
// The start and end of the table is defined
// as ,=== instead of |===.
// Also the header row is followed by new line,
// to indicate it is the header row.

,===
Writing tools, Awesomeness

Asciidoctor, Oh yeah!
MS Word, No!
,===


// We can also specify a separator.

[format="csv", separator=";", options="header"]
|===
Name;Description
Asciidoctor;Awesome way to write documentation
|=== 

The previous samples used a comma to separate values, but we can also use colon (:). The next sample contains tables defined with DSV:

== DSV table

[format="dsv", options="header"]
|===
Writing tools:Awesomeness
Asciidoctor:Oh yeah!
MS Word:No!
|===

// Alternative syntax:

:===
Writing tools: Awesomeness

Asciidoctor: Oh yeah!
MS Word: No!
:===

With the include directive we can also include data from an external CSV of DSV file to create a table (of course also the traditional pipe-symbol separated format can be in an external file):

= Table with external data

[format="csv", options="header"]
|===
include::tools.csv[]
|===

The file tools.cv has the following contents:

Writing tools, Awesomeness
Asciidoctor, Oh yeah!
MS Word, No!

Code written with Asciidoctor 1.5.0.