PrettyTable 0.6 released

[Luke Maurits]

Hi PrettyTable users,

I am pleased to announce the long-overdue release of PrettyTable 0.6, after a ridiculously long period of inactivity!  The new release is available to download from the "Downloads" tab of  the project home page and, as always, and has also been uploaded to PyPI so you can install it using easy_install or pip or other tools.

There have been many, many bugfixes and new features included in PrettyTable 0.6.  More so than any previous release, PrettyTable 0.6 has been driven by feedback and requests from users.  Thank you to everybody who reported a bug or requested a feature.

Changes from 0.5 to 0.6 include:

* Code is now simultaneously compatible with Python 2 and 3
* Replaced all setter methods with managed attributes
* All styling options can now be set persistently as managed attributes
* Added "add_style" method to make setting style options easily
* Added "del_row", "clear_rows" and "clear" methods to facilitate removal of data from table.
* Added "copy" method to facilitate cloning of a table.
* Removed caching functionality, which added complexity and fragility for relatively little gain
* Removed methods that just printed strings produced by get_string and get_html_string - just use inbuilt print!
* Improved unicode support (thanks to Google Code user ru.w31rd0 for patch!)
* Added support for decimal and floating point number formatting support (thanks to Google Code user willfurnass for the suggestion!)
* Added support for using a custom key sorting methods (thanks to Google Code user amannijhawan for the suggestion!)
* Added support for line breaks in data (suggested and implemented by Klein Stephane)
* Added support for max column widths (thanks to Tibor Arpas for the suggestion!)
* Fixed table slicing
* Fixed bug where closing <tr/> tags in HTML tables were not printed (thanks to Google Code user kehander for reporting this bug!)
* Fixed HTML table sorting bug (thanks to Google Code user dougbeal for reporting this bug!)
* Fixed bug whereby changing field_names did not recompute widths (thanks to Google Code user denilsonsa for reporting this bug!)

There have been a few changes to the API between 0.5 and 0.6, so it may take a little work to convert your application over.  The Wiki article here http://code.google.com/p/prettytable/wiki/Tutorial06 provides a quick guide to using the new API.

Thanks to everybody who tested the release candidates of 0.6!

I have several goals and ideas for PrettyTable 0.7 and hope there will not be as much of a gap between it and 0.6 as there was between 0.6 and 0.5!  You can follow the progress of 0.7 by subscribing to prettytable-devel.

Happy hacking!
Luke