Question

I want to output data with variable length in columns in a php-cli script

Example:

$pepole = Array(
  'Mirco Dellarovere' => 'Artista',
  'Nino Pepe' => 'Attore',
  'Zoe Yan' => 'Futurista',
  'Mino' => 'Elettricista'
);

foreach($pepole as $name => $work)
  {
  echo "$name\t$work\n";
  }

The output will be

Mirco Dellarovere       Artista
Nino Pepe       Attore
Zoe Yan Futurista
Mino    Elettricista

but i want it this way

Mirco Dellarovere       Artista
Nino Pepe               Attore
Zoe Yan                 Futurista
Mino                    Elettricista

how to?

🙂 thanks

Answer 1

You can pad $name to ensure a standard number of characters. Just ensure that the number of characters(20) is equal to or larger than the length of the longest name:

echo str_pad( $name, 20 ) . $work . "\n";