Tabbing in Python?

Question

I need to write data to a textfile as a table. Sort of like a database. The header has Drivers, Cars, Teams, Grids, Fastest Lap, Race Time and Points. When I try to write the data that goes under it the don't line up. As some drivers names are longer than others.

It looks a bit like this:

|     Driver      |
|Sebastian William|
|Tom Hamilton  |

Only 2 of the names actually align with the header. I am only trying to solve the issue with Drivers for now once I figure that out I should be able to gets all the other headers lined up.

Using a for loop through the array of dictionaries I set x to equal the len of the drivers name and 22 is the length of the longest name(18) plus a few spaces.

TextFile.write((items['Driver']+'\t|').expandtabs(22-x))

Any way of making them line up?

Tim Pietzcker · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-26 10:58:16Z

4

You could use format string syntax:

>>> "|{:22}|".format("Niki Lauda")
'|Niki Lauda            |'

You can also change the alignment:

>>> "|{:>22}|".format("Niki Lauda")
'|            Niki Lauda|'
>>> "|{:^22}|".format("Niki Lauda")
'|      Niki Lauda      |'

and if you want more flexibility with your column size, you can parametrize that as well:

>>> "|{:^{}}|".format("Niki Lauda", 24)
'|       Niki Lauda       |'

edited Nov 26, 2015 at 10:58

answered Nov 26, 2015 at 10:54

Tim Pietzcker

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2 Comments

Open AI - Opting Out Over a year ago

I didn't know you could nest fields. It could get confusing with longer format strings. I think I would use field names in that case.

Open AI - Opting Out Over a year ago

Field nesting is mentioned at the end of the Format String Syntax documentation and at the end of the examples.

Juxhin · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-26 11:05:31Z

2

On top of the answer provided by Tim, you could opt to use Tabulate which is very easy to use and customise.

table = [["spam",42],["eggs",451],["bacon",0]]
headers = ["item", "qty"]
print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="grid")

+--------+-------+
| item   |   qty |
+========+=======+
| spam   |    42 |
+--------+-------+
| eggs   |   451 |
+--------+-------+
| bacon  |     0 |
+--------+-------+

This provides support for multiple different database styles too. I prefer this to simply using format because it allows me to completely change the output style by configuring the tablefmt argument.

edited Nov 26, 2015 at 11:05

answered Nov 26, 2015 at 10:59

Juxhin

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