separator line (horizontal and vertical) for a table imported using \csvautobooklongtable

Question

I have been trying to fix the column width of my table so that the text would automatically get warped to the next line and not shoot outside the page. After searching for a few days, being a total newbie to Latex, I came across the first answer for this question: Automatic line breaks in csvautobooklongtable Although it does solve the problem, I'm not able to get the separating lines to appear in the table. I tried using late after line=\\\hline for example but it is not working. I'm kinda going crazy here. Here is my current code:

\usepackage{array,booktabs,longtable,csvsimple,tabularx}
\makeatletter
\csvset{
  my column width/.style={after head=\csv@pretable\begin{longtable}{*{\csv@columncount}{p{#1}}}\csv@tablehead},
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\csvautobooklongtable[separator=comma, respect all,
  my column width=3cm, ]{NewTextDocument.csv}
\end{document}

If there is an alternative using \csvreader I'm also open to that. And just to be clear on that I did try this code also:

\csvreader[longtable=|c|c|c|l|,my column width=2cm,
  no head, column count=4,
  table head=\hline,
  late after line=\\\hline,
   late after last line=\\\hline]
  {NewTextDocument.csv}{}
{\csvlinetotablerow}

But my last column has a lot of text and is shooting outside the page instead of extending the row for another line. The same happens if I use tabular instead of longtable in the same code. PS: I am trying to avoid stuff like tabularx as it didn't compile at all when I tried it using this code:

\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{llXX}\toprule
\csvreader[no head,late after line=\\\midrule,late after last line=\\\bottomrule]
  {NewTextDocument.csv}

  {\csvcoli & \csvcolii & \csvcoliii & \csvcoliv}
\end{tabularx}

Answer 1

There are two possibilities, which are both provided for in the following code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array,booktabs,longtable,csvsimple}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{NewTextDocument.csv}
name,job,age,profile
John,student,21,John has always been a very diligent student his marks always being among the best
Frederik,student,18,Frederik has not been a very diligent student
Johnson,professor,49,Johnson is just a professor ...
\end{filecontents*}

\makeatletter
\csvset{
 my first column width/.style={after head=\csv@pretable\begin{longtable}{*{\csv@columncount}{p{#1}}}\csv@tablehead},
 my second column width/.style={after head=\csv@pretable\begin{longtable}{|*{\csv@columncount}{p{#1}|}}\csv@tablehead},
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\csvautobooklongtable[
 separator=comma, 
 my first column width=3cm, 
 late after line={\\\midrule},
 late after last line={\end{longtable}}
]{NewTextDocument.csv}

\csvautobooklongtable[
 separator=comma, 
 my second column width=3cm, 
 table head={\hline\csvlinetotablerow\\\hline},
 late after line={\\\hline},
 late after last line={\\\hline\end{longtable}}
]{NewTextDocument.csv}

\end{document}

If you use the booktabs package, consider using \midrule instead of \hline. It is typically discouraged to use vertical rules in tables. But after all, it is your decision.

Using the above code, the tables will look like this:

However, I am not sure what you mean with text “shooting outside the page”. Maybe, you have text which is considerably longer than in my example … but without knowing about this, it is hard to come up with another solution.

---

Edit

To typeset bold and centered column headers, use the following entry in \csvautobooklongtable (this only works for four columns):

table head={\hline\multicolumn{1}{c}{\bfseries\csvcoli} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\bfseries\csvcolii} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\bfseries\csvcoliii} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\bfseries\csvcoliv}\\\hline},