I'll accept a pull request for this. Suggestions:

• Tell Cucumber to transpose the table with a @Transpose annotation before transforming it to List<Something>
• Add a transpose() method to DataTable

I just needed this feature: if it's still on the radar I'll try to contribute it in, at least the DataTable.transpose() method implementation.

@rlogiacco sure, go for it! Please do it on s branch.

@aslakhellesoy sorry, what do you mean by s branch? I thought I had to fork and then submit a pull request...

@rlogiacco sorry I meant separate branch :-)
Yes, in your fork.

This is the transpose method idea, just to check if it meets general requirements

public DataTable transpose() {
    List<List<String>> transposed = new ArrayList<List<String>>();
        for (int i = 0; i < gherkinRows.size(); i++) {
        Row gherkinRow = gherkinRows.get(i);
        for (int j = 0; j < gherkinRow.getCells().size(); j++) {
            List<String> row = null;
            if (j < transposed.size()) {
                row = transposed.get(j);
            }
            if (row == null) {
                row = new ArrayList<String>();
                transposed.add(row);
            }
            // fixes non rectangular tables
            while (i > row.size()) {
                row.add(new String());
            }
            row.add(gherkinRow.getCells().get(j));
        }
    }
    return DataTable.create(transposed);
}

The idea here is to maintain the DataTable immutability and just change the raw representation. On the other hand it might be necessary to change the internally used constructor to accept an additional parameter reporting the table reading direction: that parameter should be in turn get linked to @Transposed to have the internal representation directly created 90 CCW rotated... That should provide the necessary support for vertically described entities, but I need some additional investigation/test.

Please note the necessity to fix non rectangular tables by adding leading empty cells whenever necessary: I hope this is the expected behavior, but I never used the Ruby version so I need some confirmation on that.

Any comment is very welcome :-D

I had to change a few things here and there adding a private constructor to DataTable and overloading a couple of methods to propagate the annotation value.

I've added some unit tests, I didn't try to cover the whole DataTable feature set after transposal as I believe my changes shouldn't impact existing features other than rotating the table itself CCW 90 degrees.

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