I’m new to python and trying to print formatted columns of array items to the screen. I found the .format() method which can use fixed-width padding to separate the columns.
$ ./format.py
Num EmpID Name Team
1 23 Alex Sales
2 10 Alan Admin
This works OK until one of the items is longer than expected, or Num ends up longer than a single digit, or…:
./format.py
Num EmpID Name Team
1 23 Alexandria Sales
2 10 Alan Quality Assurance
What I’d like to do is loop over all the items in user_list and find the longest element (Quality Assurance in the code below) and tell .format() to pad all items based on that length. I haven’t stumbled across a way to do this however.
Is there a way to define the .format() padding at runtime somehow?
#!/usr/bin/python3
class user (object):
__slots__ = "name", "team", "empid"
def __init__ (self):
self.name = None
self.team = None
self.empid = None
def print_menu (user_list):
index = 0
print ("{:<4} {:<5} {:<8} {}".format ("Num", "EmpID", "Name", "Team"))
for person in user_list:
index = index + 1
print ("{:<4} {:<5} {:<8} {}".format (str(index), str(person.empid), person.name, person.team))
users=[]
new_user = user()
new_user.name = "Alexandria"
new_user.team = "Sales"
new_user.empid = "23"
users.append(new_user)
new_user = user()
new_user.name = "Alan"
new_user.team = "Quality Assurance"
new_user.empid = "10"
users.append(new_user)
print_menu (users)
>Solution :
Absolutly, the trick is to know that you can nest the brackets {} in a format string. You would do this in place of the numbers 4,5,or 8 in a string like "{:<4} {:<5} {:<8} {}"
heres a quick example:
longestName = 8
someObj = (5,2)
print(f'_{str(someObj):<{longestName}}_')
That print results in : "_(5, 2) _"
As you can see it has been padded to some integer we can get beforehand by just iterating over all the items and storing the longest item before printing.