Question

Using python2.7, I’m trying to print to screen tabular data.

This is roughly what my code looks like:

for i in mylist:
   print "{}\t|{}\t|".format (i, f(i))

The problem is that, depending on the length of i or f(i) the data won’t be aligned.

This is what I’m getting:

|foo |bar |
|foobo   |foobar  |

What I want to get:

|foo     |bar     |
|foobo   |foobar  |

Are there any modules that permit doing this?

Answer 1

It’s not really hard to roll your own formatting function:

def print_table(table):
    col_width = [max(len(x) for x in col) for col in zip(*table)]
    for line in table:
        print "| " + " | ".join("{:{}}".format(x, col_width[i])
                                for i, x in enumerate(line)) + " |"

table = [(str(x), str(f(x))) for x in mylist]
print_table(table)