Formatting Output

Chris cwitts at gmail.com
Mon Jun 2 17:34:52 EDT 2008


On Jun 2, 9:43 pm, Doug Morse <mo... at edoug.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Jun 2008 12:42:12 -0700 (PDT), Mensanator <mensana... at aol.com> wrote:
> >  On Jun 2, 3:38 am, Chris <cwi... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Jun 2, 9:34 am, "victor.hera... at gmail.com"
>
> > > <victor.hera... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Hi,
>
> > > > i am building a little script and i want to output a series of columns
> > > > more or less like this:
>
> > > > 1  5  6
> > > > 2  2  8
> > > > 2  9  5
> > ...
>
> I have a related question:
>
> Does Python have (or can emulate) the formatted output capability found in
> Perl?
>
> For example, all I have to do to get nicely formatted (i.e., aligned) output
> is provide values for special STDOUT variables (i.e., STDOUT_TOP, STDOUT,
> STDOUT_BOTTOM, etc.), exemplified by:
>
>   format STDOUT_TOP =
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   ~
>   .
>
>   format STDOUT =
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>   $res->{'full_name'},  $res->{'phone_1'},         $res->{'phone_1_type'}
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ~
>   $res->{'address_1a'},                $res->{'address_2a'}
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ~
>   $res->{'address_1b'},                $res->{'address_2b'}
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ~
>   $res->{'address_1c'},                $res->{'address_2c'}
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ~
>   $city_1                              $city_2
>   @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ~
>   $res->{'email_1'},                   $res->{'email_2'}
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   ~
>   .
>
> Then, all I have to do is populate my $res object/hash as desired -- in this
> example simple the results of a SQL query -- and lastly just call the "write"
> function:
>
>   write;
>
> and Perl will produce very nicely formatted results.  This is useful not only
> for producing human readable output, but also fixed-column-width data files,
> etc.  I'd love to learn the Pythonistic way of doing the same thing.
>
> Thanks!
> Doug

Can't seem to do this with dictionaries but...

preformatted_string = """
%s %20s %20s
%s %30s
%s %30s
"""

print preformatted_string % ('first name'[:20], 'contact num 1'[:20],
        'contact num type'[:20], 'address line 1'[:30], 'address line
2'[:30]
        'address line 3'[:30], 'address line 4'[:30])

You could do something like that.  the "[:20]" etc @ the end of the
inputs is ofc to trim the strings to a max length.  The string
formatter supports "%<number of characters to move to the right>s" so
you can use that for alignment.  It's a bit late so maybe I buggered
up when I tried to use dictionary assignment with it, but who knows :p



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