It'd be useful to support regex as a column separator

[farcaller]

I'm thinking for some option to make px aux|ov -c work in an easy way and honestly I'd prefer some smartness on the ov's side (e.g. to detect basic columns like awk does). Ideally -c alone would match against \s+ as a column separator, but otherwise it'd be useful if a regexp could be a separator at all, as vanilla ps idents with several spaces.

Yes, I know it can be fixed on ps side, but I think it's be a quality-of-life improvement done on the ov side.

[noborus]

Thank you.
I think this is a good idea.
However, to implement this, we may need to switch between interpreting it as a delimiter and a regular expression.
For example, if ". " as a delimiter, I am not happy with the need for escaping.

[farcaller]

That's very reasonable. I'd think a separate flag would work for a regexp?

[noborus]

Hmm, maybe I should implement a switch like search...
Or looking for another good idea.

[noborus]

Or looking for another good idea.

It's an idea I came up with.

When using regular expressions, enclose them in /. /regexp/.
/[,|;]/ and /[a-z]/ are treated as regular expressions.
Command line options can be enclosed in double quotes. "/[,|;]/"
"/", "/end" and "s/e" are treated as strings.
If you want to treat "//" as a character string, use "\/\/".

[noborus]

I created guesswidth to guess the width of the width format.
This gives better results than using /\s+/ for the column-delimiter.
I plan to introduce this to ov as well.