Question

I have Python code that pulls info from a sqlite database and then write to a html file. I’m trying to write as preformatted text and the code below places the text in columns like I am try to accomplish, but (obviously) the link is the entire length of the string, including the whitespace to the right from the .ljust.

How can I get it to only link the text of item.title instead of the entire string, plus whitespace?

content += '<a href="/%s/">%s</a>  %s' % (item.slug, str(item.title).ljust(25), item.date.ljust(10)

Answer 1

If you must do it on one line, the following should work for you:

content += '<a href="/%s/">%s</a> %s  %s' % tuple(itertools.chain((item.slug,),
           str(item.title).ljust(25).split(" ", 1), (item.date.ljust(10),)))

However the following should be a little easier to read

values = [item.slug]
values += str(item.title).ljust(25).split(" ", 1)
values.append(item.date.ljust(10))
content += '<a href="/%s/">%s</a> %s  %s' % values

Notice I’ve added one extra space to your formatting string to make up for the one lost to the string split operation.

---

EDIT: The above code fails when item.title is greater than 25 characters. A revised version is below.

title, spaces = (str(item.title).ljust(25)+" ").split(" ", 1)
content += '<a href="/%s/">%s</a>%s  %s' % (item.slug, title, 
                                            spaces, item.date.ljust(10))

This version adds a space to the end of the justified title, so the split operation is guaranteed to return a tuple of length 2.