Line breaks in meta values break wp post meta list

[johnbillion]

Given a post meta field with a value that contains line breaks, the output of wp post meta list breaks. Example:

$ wp post meta list 123
+---------+----------+------------+
| post_id | meta_key | meta_value |
+---------+----------+------------+
| 123     | foo      | foo        |
| 123     | bar      | bar
bar
bar
bar
bar
bar |
| 123     | baz      | baz        |
+---------+----------+------------+

Should this output be improved? A potential improvement would be:

+---------+----------+------------+
| post_id | meta_key | meta_value |
+---------+----------+------------+
| 123     | foo      | foo        |
| 123     | bar      | bar        |
|         |          | bar        |
|         |          | bar        |
|         |          | bar        |
|         |          | bar        |
| 123     | baz      | baz        |
+---------+----------+------------+

This might be difficult to implement though.

Note: The wp post get command doesn't suffer from this problem, which means line breaks in the post_content field don't break the output.

[tfirdaus]

@schlessera I was able to replicate this issue:

001 Scenario: List post meta with line break value   # features/post-meta.feature:492
      Then STDOUT should be a table containing rows: # features/post-meta.feature:503
        post_id meta_key        meta_value
        1       foo     bar
        bar
        bar
         (Exception)

But looks like we're facing a similar issue with the post list command as well.

The output changes depending on the window size though, and it seems like the line break is simply replaced with a blank space? 🤔

Handling the line break might be difficult, as @johnbillion mentioned. However, we could probably consider making a compromise by replacing the line break with a blank space in the table format. I haven't checked the JSON and YML formats, but I believe retaining the line break in those two formats would be much simpler.

What's your thought?

[BhargavBhandari90]

Hi I tried to fix this issue, but for that I had to modify https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/blob/main/php/WP_CLI/Formatter.php from code wp-cli file.

Not sure if this is the right approach or not. But result is expected.

Before:

After I modified Formatter.php

PR I've created wp-cli/wp-cli#6055