Bash printf multiple lines from arg in columns

Question

I've been fiddling around with this for hours but can't get it to work, so maybe my approach is wrong.

I want to pretty-display multiple lines of a message, so the 'title' is to the left, and then the message aligns to that in a column, so for example, like:

WARNING: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
         Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
         How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!

or

NOTE: This happened.
      Foo bar.

and so on.

I'm trying to do this with printf and column based on some answers I could find, but as I say, maybe this approach can never work?

At the moment, I have the first string for printf as the 'title' and then the rest of the args are the message to align to that, like so:

#!/bin/bash

warn() {
  printf '%s+%s\n' 'WARNING:' "${@}" | column --table --separator '+'
}

warn "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." \
     "+Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." \
     "+How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!"

Can this be done similarly? Or what is the best way/some other way to do this?

Actual output:

WARNING:  The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.    
          Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.            How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!

Answer 1

Here is an implementation that requires no loop and no sub shell:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

taggedMessage() {
  # Prints first message with prepend tag
  printf '%s %s\n' "${1:?}" "${2:?}"

  [ $# -gt 2 ] || return # Returns if only one message

  # Constructs blank filler of same length as tag
  printf -v filler '%*s' ${#1} ''

  shift 2 # Shifts arguments at 2nd message

  # Prints remaining messages with prepend filler
  printf %s\\n "${@/#/$filler }"
}

warn() { taggedMessage 'WARNING:' "$@";}

warn "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." \
     "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." \
     "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!"

taggedMessage 'SINGLE:' 'A single-line message.'

taggedMessage 'RANDOM TAG:' \
    "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." \
    "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." \
    "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!"