Printing with indentation in python

Question

is there a way to print the following,

print user + ":\t\t" + message 

so that lengthy messages that are wider than the length of the terminal always wraps (starts from the same position) ? so for example this

Username:              LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT 

should become

Username:              LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT                        RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT 

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for here is the textwrap module:

user = "Username" prefix = user + ": " preferredWidth = 70 wrapper = textwrap.TextWrapper(initial_indent=prefix, width=preferredWidth,                                subsequent_indent=' '*len(prefix)) message = "LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT " * 3 print wrapper.fill(message) 

This prints:

Username: LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT           LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT           LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT 

---

If you actually want to use tabs in the indent, that's a little trickier, because you have to first tab-expand the initial_indent to figure out the correct subsequent_indent to use. And, because your prefix actually ends with two tabs, it's even more complicated. Here's the simplest I've come up with:

user = "Username" prefix = user + ":\t\t" expanded_indent = textwrap.fill(prefix+'$', replace_whitespace=False)[:-1] subsequent_indent = ' ' * len(expanded_indent) wrapper = textwrap.TextWrapper(initial_indent=prefix,                                subsequent_indent=subsequent_indent) message = "LEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFTLEFT RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT " * 3 print wrapper.fill(message) 

If you do this repeatedly, you will probably want to wrap that mess up in a function.