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Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

You're reading from   Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook Over 100 recipes to fully leverage the features of the standard library in Python

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788830829
Length 366 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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 Molina Molina
Author Profile Icon Molina
Molina
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Toc

Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
1. Containers and Data Structures FREE CHAPTER 2. Text Management 3. Command Line 4. Filesystem and Directories 5. Date and Time 6. Read/Write Data 7. Algorithms 8. Cryptography 9. Concurrency 10. Networking 11. Web Development 12. Multimedia 13. Graphical User Interfaces 14. Development Tools 1. Other Books You May Enjoy Index

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']
  1. Then we need to fix...
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