Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

There are three problems we have to solve to implement our maketable function:

• Lengthen text shorter than 20 characters
• Split text longer than 20 characters on multiple lines
• Fill missing lines in columns with fewer lines

If we decompose our maketable function, the first thing it does is to split text longer than 20 characters into multiple lines:

[textwrap.wrap(col, COLSIZE) for col in cols]

That applied to each column leads us to having a list of columns, each containing a list of rows:

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

Then we need to ensure that each row shorter than 20 characters is extended to be exactly 20 characters, so that our ...