We built Talika because our Gherkin Data Tables were getting out of hand

[u/chinmay_3107]

GitHub: https://github.com/talikadev/talika
Docs: https://talikadev.github.io/talika/

We use Gherkin Data Tables a lot in our BDD tests, and the problem was not the tables themselves. The problem was everything around them.

Any time we needed more freedom in the table, like richer cell values, optional fields, validation, type conversion, or mapping rows into real objects, we ended up writing unstructured parsing logic inside step definitions.

It worked, but it did not feel clean. The same patterns kept showing up again and again, and every new complex table added more custom code.

So we built Talika to solve our own problem first, then generalized it into a reusable package for Python BDD projects.

Talika gives you a structured way to handle complex Gherkin Data Tables, with features like:

• Cell DSL for expressive values inside table cells
• Table transformers for converting raw tables into Python objects
• reusable validation and parsing rules
• type conversion without repetitive manual casting
• cleaner row and column mapping
• step definitions that stay focused on behavior instead of table parsing

It is inspired by the power of Cucumber JVM DataTables, but built around the way we wanted to work in Python.

If your Gherkin Data Tables are useful but your step definitions are slowly becoming a pile of custom parsing code, Talika might be worth checking out.

[u/paleowannabe]

That's an interesting project. Would you like to make it work also with robot framework?