How do I line up text from python into columns in my terminal?

Question

I'm printing out some values from a script in my terminal window like this:

for i in items:
    print "Name: %s Price: %d" % (i.name, i.price)

How do I make these line up into columns?

Answer 1

If you know the maximum lengths of data in the two columns, then you can use format qualifiers. For example if the name is at most 20 chars long and the price will fit into 10 chars, you could do

print "Name: %-20s Price: %10d" % (i.name, i.price)

This is better than using tabs as tabs won't line up in some circumstances (e.g. if one name is quite a bit longer than another).

If some names won't fit into usable space, then you can use the . format qualifier to truncate the data. For example, using "%-20.20s" for the name format will truncate any longer names to fit in the 20-character column.