Question

I am trying to create a nice column list in python for use with commandline admin tools which I create.

Basicly, I want a list like:

[['a', 'b', 'c'], ['aaaaaaaaaa', 'b', 'c'], ['a', 'bbbbbbbbbb', 'c']]

To turn into:

a            b            c
aaaaaaaaaa   b            c
a            bbbbbbbbbb   c

Using plain tabs wont do the trick here because I don’t know the longest data in each row.

This is the same behavior as ‘column -t’ in Linux..

$ echo -e "a b c\naaaaaaaaaa b c\na bbbbbbbbbb c"
a b c
aaaaaaaaaa b c
a bbbbbbbbbb c

$ echo -e "a b c\naaaaaaaaaa b c\na bbbbbbbbbb c" | column -t
a           b           c
aaaaaaaaaa  b           c
a           bbbbbbbbbb  c

I have looked around for various python libraries to do this but can’t find anything useful.

Answer 1

data = [['a', 'b', 'c'], ['aaaaaaaaaa', 'b', 'c'], ['a', 'bbbbbbbbbb', 'c']]

col_width = max(len(word) for row in data for word in row) + 2  # padding
for row in data:
    print "".join(word.ljust(col_width) for word in row)

a            b            c            
aaaaaaaaaa   b            c            
a            bbbbbbbbbb   c   

What this does is calculate the longest data entry to determine the column width, then use .ljust() to add the necessary padding when printing out each column.