[Tutor] Making table

[Kent Johnson]

Alan Gauld wrote:
> others have discussed format strings.
> One final tip is to put the format string in a variable then use that
> in printing/writing the output
> 
> eg:
> 
> fmt = '%10.3f\t%10.3f\t%10.3f'
> print fmt % v1,v2,v3
> 
> This has the advantage that you can build the format string
> dynamically by examining the data first - eg the maximum
> length of an entry.

You don't need to build the format string dynamically to get control of 
the maximum width. A neat trick is that if you use '*' for the format 
width, the width will be read from the parameter list:

In [30]: '%*.3f' % (5, 1.2)
Out[30]: '1.200'
In [31]: '%*.3f' % (10, 1.2)
Out[31]: '     1.200'

Kent