Melissa: thanks for writing this question, because in doing so, you have turned 
me on to the entable script, which is really cool. Years ago, I had written a 
fairly simple C program to align columns, and I'll probably still use it, but 
entable is much more flexible. It can be used either on the command line or as 
a BBedit plugin. It appears to use spaces, not tabs, to adjust the columns (at 
least by default). I haven't had a chance to play with it much, but run 
“entable -help” (one dash only) to see the various options. Unless you need to 
do something pretty radical with column alignment, I suspect you'll be able to 
get there with entable.

Greg Shenaut

On Dec 30, 2013, at 05:51 , Melissa <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know of a quick way to nicely format data into columns?
> 
> Say I have tabbed data like the following:
> 
> Fruit         Colour          Amount
> Apple         Green           2
> Apple         Red             31
> Grapefruit            Pink            1
> 
> There are two tabs between each bit of data, but in order to line the data up 
> visually, the first three rows need three tabs before the colour column, and 
> there needs to also be a third tab before "31" to make that amount line up.
> 
> I've Googled and seen mention of a program called "entable" which doesn't 
> seem to work.
> 
> Is there anything obvious I'm missing anywhere? The data I'm working with can 
> vary from 35 characters to 100+, so it would save quite a bit of time to find 
> something to automate this... is there anything built in to BBEdit that can 
> do it?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Melissa
> 
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