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.

How to do it...

Here are the steps for this recipe:

1. The textwrap module once combined with the features of the str object can help us achieve the expected result. First we need the content of the columns we want to print:

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

2. Then we need to fix...