Question

In a plain-text .erb template, what method would you suggest I use to produce the most maintainable/readable code for something like this:

ITEM DESCRIPTION                                           QTY       PRICE

Product Name One                                             1      $10.00
Another Product With a Longer Name                           2       $5.00
Yet Another Item                                             1      $30.00

Where each of those rows is (obviously) variable, based on the items that have been purchased.

I could calculate the needed whitespace in a helper method, but is this already a solved problem with a more elegant solution?

Answer 1

Sounds like you need a plain text table generator. The only one I can think of for ruby is this: https://github.com/visionmedia/terminal-table but there may be others if this one doesn’t fit your needs.