Inspired by some awesome-as-always code written by my co-worker Mike Adams, here’s a helper function to help create plaintext data tables in PHP. This is particularly useful for PHP-based CLI scripts (we use quite a few at Automattic) or for plaintext e-mails.

But first, here’s an example output with the optional dividers enabled:

   ID | First Name     | Last Name   
-------------------------------------
    1 | Alex           | Mills       
    2 | John           | Smith       
    3 | Barack         | Obama       
    4 | Fred           | Flinstone   
12345 | ReallyLongName | IsReallyLong

Click here to keep reading and see the code »