lynx-dev lynx wish: format tables using tab separation

[Niels Möller]

Hi,

I'd like to propose a feature that I couldn't find in lynx-2.8.1. I'd
like an option to format tables as tab separated lines. I.e use a
single TAB character between cells on the same row, and a single NL
character between rows. And no other linebreaks within the table.

I realise that this format doesn't generalize to recursive use of
tables. In this case, one could fall back to non TAB-based formatting,
or exit with an error message (the latter makes sense for -dump only,
I guess). One could also offer some option to specify different
separators for tables inside other tables.

One scenario where this option would come in handy is as follows: A
company has some tabular data, in some database or exc*l or whatever.
They publish it on the web by converting it to html. The proposed
option should make it easier for scripts to download and process such
data. With the current output from lynx -dump, information about cell
boundaries is lost, and if cells include whitespace, it's difficult to
reconstruct the boundaries.

Regards,
/Niels Möller