Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

Aligning text

When printing tabular data, it's usually very important to ensure that the text is properly aligned to a fixed length, no longer and no shorter than the space we reserved for our table cell.

If the text is too short, the next column might start too early; if it's too long, it might start too late. This leads to results like this:

col1 | col2-1
col1-2 | col2-2

Or this:

col1-000001 | col2-1
col1-2 | col2-2

Both of these are really hard to read and are far from showing a proper table.

Given a fixed column width (20 characters), we want our text to always be of that exact length so that it won't result in a misaligned table.