Question

I’m trying to nicely format some text data from database to send in emails in Django. I’m encountering some problems with strings with line breaks.

In particular,my desired output is:

1)  t1                     t2
    t1_continue            t2_end
    t1_end

2)  s1                     s3
    s1_continue
    s1_end

Here the strings taken from database are “t1\nt1_continue\nt1_end”, “t2\nt2_end”, “s1\ns1_continue\ns1_end” and “s3”.

This desired output is like what we see if we’re having 3 columns in Excel.

What I want to say is that some strings contain line breaks so simple formatting such as:

print str(index) + '\t' + col1 + '\t' + col2 

won’t work.

Please share with me your approach.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

You can use a <table> to display tabular data in the email body.

Before the loop that prints each table row, print the table header:

print('<table>')

For each data row, format it like so:

print('<tr><td>{0}</td><td>{1}</td><td>{2}</td></tr>'.format(index, col1, col2))   

Finally, after the loop that prints each table row, print the table footer:

print('</table>')