How to paste text into an org table with a set number of columns?

Question

I usually have a bulk of items separated by either spaces or new lines and I want to have them all full a table with a set number of columns.

Basically if I want the table to always have 3 columns, then this text:

test1 test2     test3 test4
   test5  test6 test7

will become:

|test1|test2|test3|
|test4|test5|test6|
|test7|     |     |

How to achieve that?

Answer 1

Here is your text

test1 test2     test3 test4
   test5  test6 test7

Use C-M-% (query-replace-regexp) to group the text by three, i.e.,

;; Type C-q C-j to get <newline>
C-M-% [ <newline>]+ → \,(if (zerop (% (1+ \#) 3)) "\n" "|")

then you'll get

test1|test2|test3
test4|test5|test6
test7|

Use C-x r t (string-rectangle) to prepend | to each line, then you'll get

|test1|test2|test3
|test4|test5|test6
|test7|

Switch to org-mode and press TAB, then you'll get

| test1 | test2 | test3 |
| test4 | test5 | test6 |
| test7 |       |       |

---

If you want an Emacs command to do the above, you can refer to the code below:

(defun my-org-table-convert-region (b e)
  (interactive "*r")
  (let ((s (delete-and-extract-region b e))
        (old-point (point))
        (counter 0))
    (insert
     (replace-regexp-in-string
      (rx (1+ (in "\s\t\n")))
      (lambda (_)
        (if (zerop (% (cl-incf counter) 3))
            "\n"
          " "))
      (string-trim s)))
    (org-table-convert-region old-point (point) " +")))