Splitting lines into fields in Emacs

Question

I have the following data

Food $44
Transport $52
Rentals $102
...

I want to transform to the following

Food      $44
Transport $52
Rentals   $102
...

Is there any in-built function in Emacs to do this? I'm not familiar with elisp. Thanks.

Answer 1

Several possibilities. The easiest is probably C-u M-x align. See

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AlignCommands

The other possibility is to use table-mode. Just do M-x table-capture, use one space as column and newline (C-q C-j) as row delimiter. Afterwards, you can use M-x table-release do get rid of the lines. For more information, see

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TableMode

(and the Emacs manual, of course).

Answer 2

One of the emacs align commands should do the job.

Start with C-u M-x align after selecting the region you want to line up.