NAME

Text::BoxPlot - Render ASCII box and whisker charts

VERSION

version 0.001

SYNOPSIS

    use Text::BoxPlot;

    my $tbp = Text::BoxPlot->new( with_scale => 1 );

    say for $tbp->render(
        ["series A", -2.5, -1, 0, 1, 2.5],
        ["series B", -1, 0, 1, 2, 3.5],
        ["series C", 0, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 5.5],
    );

    # produces this output:

            |-2.70968                                               4.17742|
    series A   --------------========O========--------------
    series B                 --------========O=========--------------
    series C                         -------------====O=====--------------->

DESCRIPTION

This module generates ASCII box-and-whisker charts.

ATTRIBUTES

width

Defines the maximum total width of a rendered box-plot, including the series label. Defaults to 72.

label_width

Defines the width of the space reserved for the series names. Defaults to 10.

box_weight

Defines the output scale in terms of how much of the chart width should be used for inter-quartile range boxes (the smallest 1st quartile to the largest 3rd quartile). The default is 1, which means half the width is allocated to boxes and the other half allocated to whiskers outside the box range (split between the left and right sides).

Must be a positive number. As it gets bigger, more whiskers may get cut off. As it gets smaller, there is more room for extremely large whiskers, but the box proportions may be obscured.

with_scale

If true, the first line returned by render will be show the minimum and maximum values displayed on the chart.

Defaults to false.

CONSTRUCTORS

new

    $tbp = Text::BoxPlot->new( %attributes );
    $tbp = Text::BoxPlot->new( \%attributes );

Constructs a new object. Attributes may be passed as key-value pairs or as a hash reference;

METHODS

render

    @lines = $tbp->render( @dataset );

Given a list of datasets, generates lines of output to render a box-and-whisker chart in ASCII.

Each dataset must be an array reference with the following fields:

• name of the dataset

• minimum value

• 1st quartile value

• 2nd quartile (median) value

• 3rd quartile value

• maximum value

For example, this code:

    my $tbp = Text::BoxPlot->new( with_scale => 1 );
    say for $tbp->render( [ 'test data', -2.5, -1, 0, 1, 2.5 ] );

Produces this output:

              |-2                                                         2|
    test data <--------------===============O===============-------------->

The greater-than and less-than signs at the edge indicate that the whisker has been cut off at this scale.

If the box_weight were set to 0.5, render would produce this output:

              |-3                                                         3|
    test data      ---------------==========O==========---------------

SUPPORT

Bugs / Feature Requests

Please report any bugs or feature requests through the issue tracker at https://github.com/dagolden/text-boxplot/issues. You will be notified automatically of any progress on your issue.

Source Code

This is open source software. The code repository is available for public review and contribution under the terms of the license.

https://github.com/dagolden/text-boxplot

  git clone git://github.com/dagolden/text-boxplot.git

AUTHOR

David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is Copyright (c) 2013 by David Golden.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004

cpanm Text::BoxPlot

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Text::BoxPlot