Question

I couldn’t find this anywhere; I might finding it with the wrong keywords.

Pictures paint a thousand words, so let me explain.

Supposed we have a set of unknown number of String:

String hello = "Hello world\n Welcome\n"
String goodbye = "Goodbye\n See you in the next life\n"
String do = "Do something\n Be part of us\n"

I would like a function that produce such result:

String hellogoodbyedo = "
  Hello world_________________Goodbye________________________Do Something\n
  Welcome_____________________See you in the next life_______Be part of us\n"

In which _ means spaces. Is there a smart way of doing such?

Answer 1

You can use

System.out.printf("%-20s%-s20s%-20s%n", field1, field2, field3);