using tabulation in Python logging format

Question

I'm using the python logging module with the "native" configuration file support (config.fileconfig) as describe in the documentation here :

http://docs.python.org/library/logging.html (see the logging.conf file)

I was wondering if it's possible to supply a tabulated data format in the configuration file:

The sample configuration file is the following:

[formatter_simpleFormatter]  
format=%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s

I though that using the \t in the format would be enough but it doesn't:

format=%(asctime)s\t%(name)s\t%(levelname)s\t%(message)s\t  

I tried a couple of things without success. I suppose it's really easy to do but I don't find it!

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Sorry for coming late to the party, but the info could be useful for others also ...

I also wanted a tabulated looking log, especially the "levelname" field

my format was looking like this

format = %(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(name)s - %(message)s  

which made my logs look something like this

2014-10-01 17:42:54,261 - INFO - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:43:09,700 - DEBUG - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:02,994 - WARNING - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:31,686 - CRTITICAL - internal.....

my solution was to change the format like this

format = %(asctime)s - %(levelname)-8s - %(name)s - %(message)s  

which turned my logs in something like this

2014-10-01 17:42:54,261 - INFO     - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:43:09,700 - DEBUG    - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:02,994 - WARNING  - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:31,686 - CRITICAL - internal.....

The "8" is the length of the longest string that is expected there, in this case, "CRITICAL". The "-" tells to right-pad the string

side-note: doing

print "-%3s-" % "abcd"

will output

-abcd-

... the string doesn't get truncated

Answer 2

Have you tried entering a literal tab character in the config file instead of \t? This works for me.