Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

Here are the steps for this recipe:

1. The textwrap module once combined with the features of the str object can help us achieve the expected result. First we need the content of the columns we want to print:

cols = ['hello world', 
        'this is a long text, maybe longer than expected, surely long enough', 
        'one more column']

2. Then we need to fix the size of a column:

COLSIZE = 20

3. Once those are ready, we can actually implement our indentation function:

import textwrap, itertools

def maketable(cols):
    return 'n'.join(map(' | '.join, itertools.zip_longest(*[
        [s.ljust(COLSIZE) for s in textwrap.wrap(col, COLSIZE)] for col in cols
    ], fillvalue=' '*COLSIZE)))

4. Then we can properly print any table:

>>> print(maketable(cols)) hello ...