Question

this piece of code is driving me crazy. I’m trying to print a help list for a program I’m writing. So I define a dictionary, where the keys are the words that the user might want to be clarified and the values are the descriptions of the words. Then I use a for... in... loop to print it all. To put it simple:

ERROR = '\x1B[1;31m ERROR!! \x1B[0m'
WARNING = '\x1B[1;33m WARNING! \x1B[0m'
SUCCESS = '\x1B[1;32m Operation successful! \x1B[0m'
ABORTED = '\x1B[1;33m Operation aborted! \x1B[0m'
help_descriptions = {'\x1B[34m NUMBERS \x1B[0m':'are the options you can take.',\
                 ERROR:'means you ran into and error and the program can\'t go on.',\
                 WARNING:'means that the data you entered might cause problems.',\
                 SUCCESS:'means that no run-time errors where encoutered.',\
                 ABORTED:'means you aborted a previous option, deleting\n the data associated.'}
def HelpMe():
print(70 * '~')
print(' HELP')
print(70 * '~')
for key in help_descriptions.keys():
    print('%10s %s' % (key, help_descriptions.get(key)))
print(70 * '~')

The only thing that doesn’t work is the %10s token. I mean, it does print the value of the key, but it does not puts extra spaces if needed. I’ve tried to run in an interactive section this piece of code

print('%10s' % 'foo')

and the output is right.

Does any of you have an idea of how make it work?

Additional info: I’m running Python 3 on a Linux machine running Ubuntu 11.04. This code is part of a custom module I’ve written to store some static text or simple functions that print text. So I import this module in the main application, it is not stand-alone.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The problem is that those are at least 10 characters long: remember, the ANSI escape characters count. You could do any of the following:

1. Increase the field width until you get the width you want (since all of them seem to contain the same number of escape characters, this might work).
2. Strip the escape characters and use the result for padding.
3. Pad the labels (like “WARNING!”) to the correct field width before adding the escape characters.

Any of these should achieve the desired effect.