I would like to prettyprint a table-like data structure in Haskell (a list of

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Asked: June 2, 20262026-06-02T10:54:17+00:00 2026-06-02T10:54:17+00:00

I would like to prettyprint a table-like data structure in Haskell (a list of

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I would like to prettyprint a table-like data structure in Haskell (a list of columns).

For example…

Table [
    StrCol "strings" ["a", "bc", "c"],
    IntCol "ints" [1, 30, -2],
    DblCol "doubles" [2.0, 4.5, -3.2]]

Should render something like…

strings ints doubles
    "a"    1     2.0
   "bc"   30     4.5
    "c"   -2    -3.2

Currently I have implemented this functionality in Text.PrettyPrint that comes with the most recent version of the Haskell Platform. Unfortunately the <+> operator orients multi-line documents “diagonally” from each other.

eg

(text "a" $+$ text "b") <+> (text "c" $+$ text "d")

renders as

a
b c
  d

rather than

a c
b d

As a result, I transpose the cells and merge them horizontally first, then vertically, but this results in the columns not being aligned.

In an older table pretty-printing question, augustss refers to adding some more code to have the columns automatically adapt to the widest entry.

I’m guessing that “sizedText” with the maximum length of each column would do this, except that this function doesn’t appear to be part of the Haskell Platform Text.PrettyPrint module (I think it’s in the closely related Text.Pretty package).

What’s the simplest non-hacky way of implementing this pretty-print functionality? This is a small part of my project so I’d like to avoid writing my own pretty-printing, and I’d prefer to avoid module dependencies if I can.