Converts the usual, space separated, table from a shell command into a list of json object where the keys are the columns' names and the values the different data for each row.

You can install this library through NPM:

npm install node-shell-parser

  shellParser(shellOutput, options);

• shellOutput: the string resulting from running your command
• options.separator: which character separates your tabled data, default is one space
• options.skipLines: how many lines to skip before meeting the columns definition header

Execute a process, get its output and then simply feed it to the parser:

var shellParser = require('node-shell-parser');
var child = require('child_process');

var process = child.spawn('ps');
var shellOutput = '';

process.stdout.on('data', function (chunk) {
  shellOutput += chunk;
});

process.stdout.on('end', function () {
  console.log(shellParser(shellOutput))
});

Black magic in action:

~/projects/namshi/node-shell-parser (master ✘)✭ ᐅ node test.js
[ { PID: '729', TTY: 'pts/1    00:0', TIME: '0:00', CMD: 'zsh' },
  { PID: '057', TTY: 'pts/1    00:0', TIME: '0:00', CMD: 'node' },
  { PID: '059', TTY: 'pts/1    00:0', TIME: '0:00', CMD: 'ps' } ]