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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T10:02:29+00:00

I need to format database records into a table that a web forum can

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I need to format database records into a table that a web forum can display properly (using bbcode). The forum in question does not respect spaces no matter which type of formatting tag I use but does have a monospace font, so I need to replace all spaces by underscores like this to keep everything aligned:

Field____Field____Field
Value____Value____Value
Value____Value____Value
Value____Value____Value
Value____Value____Value

I’ve looked into Perl formats and printf, but I can’t figure out how to make the spaces and tabs into underscore using these methods. The text also have variable length, so I need the columns to be variable as well (can’t hardcode fixed values).

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A bit of a hack but I would use sprintf but I would replace the space in my values with another character that can not be found in these values (like ~). This can be done with a simple regex.
    After sprintf I would replace the spaces with underlines and my special character in the values back to space.

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