Question

For example CSV and JSON are human and machine readable text formats.

Now I am looking for something similar even more graphical for table data representation.

Instead of:

1,"machines",14.91
3,"mammals",1.92
50,"fruit",4.239
789,"funghi",29.3

which is CSV style or

[
 [1,"machines",14.91],
 [3,"mammals",1.92],
 [50,"fruit",4.239],
 [789,"funghi",29.3]
]

which is JSON style, and I am not going to give an XML example, something similar like this is what I have in mind:

   1 | "machines"| 14.91
   3 | "mammals" |  1.92
  50 | "fruit"   |  4.239
 789 | "funghi"  | 29.3

There should be reader and writer libraries for it for some languages and it should somehow be a standard. Of course I could roll my own but if there is also a standard I’d go with that.

I have seen similar things as part of wiki or markup languages, but it should serve as a human easily editable data definition format and be read and also written by software libraries.

That’s not exactly what markup and wiki languages are for. What I am looking for belongs more to the csv,json and xml family.

Answer 1

I would checkout textile. It has a table syntax almost exactly like what you described.

For example, the table in your example would be constructed like this:

|   1 | machines | 14.91  |
|   3 | mammals  |  1.92  |
|  50 | fruit    |  4.239 |
| 789 | funghi   | 29.3   |

An alternative (albeit not optimized for tabular data), is YAML, which is nice for JSON-ish type data.