Hue is a very handy SQL assistant for Hadoop, where you can easily run Hive or Impala query.

I was asked if it was possible to have thousands separator in the display of the query results. There is no option in Hue, I thought I could get away with Django environment variables but either it’s not possible, or I got it wrong.

In any case, it did not feel great. You could argue that Hue is a display tool so it’s OK to format the output, but it would be for all users, and they might not all want that…

Long story short, I removed my Hadoop administrator cap and put on my dirty creative one. Once the results are loaded, it’s a trivial javascript manipulation to format them. Furthermore, Hue uses jquery which makes it even easier. So I came up with this little bookmarklet. Put it in the URL field of a bookmark, including the ‘javascript:’ prefix. If you want to format your output, just click on the bookmarklet et voilà:

javascript:(
  function(){
    $('table.resultTable td').each(
      function(){
        if (!isNaN($(this).text())) {
          $(this).text($(this).text().toString().replace(/(\d)(?=(\d{3})+(?!\d))/g, '$1,'))
        }
      }
    )
  }()
);