I agree with you about the best representation of this particular set of data.

> not slavishly following some preset rules.

And I said more than once that the editor shouldn't change the authors decision but assist when wanted.

I'm just skeptical there is a Perl tool yet, which auto-detects tabular structure with empty cells and represents it accordingly.

I could think of ways to implement this, and would be thankful to hear about tools which do it already.

All discussed tools so far are either not changing key order or sorting alphabetically.