Neatly formatting results into a table

Would you like to produce a neat table of results, with the columns just wide enough to take the data? That sounds straightforward, but you can't output anything until you've looked through all the lines to see how long each of them will be.

I was talking about this algorithm today, and this evening I've written it up as an example of formatted printing in Ruby, and posted the complete example on our web site [here]

The trick is to do a "test" format of each of the values in each column first to find the largest, then substitute the column width into the format string for 'real' before you output the data. It's at times like this that you're really glad that a format conversion like %7.2f means "a total width of 7 columns of which 2 are after the decimal place" and not "seven figures before the decimal and 2 after"!

This technique is not appropriate if you're using a variable width font, or if you're generating output for inclusion in a web page (there are some exceptions to this latter)

(written 2010-02-01, updated 2010-02-02)

Associated topics are indexed under

R106 - Input and Output in Ruby
  [3429] Searching through all the files in or below a directory - Ruby, Tcl, Perl - (2011-09-09)
  [2974] Formatting your output - options available in Ruby - (2010-09-29)
  [2893] Exclamation marks and question marks on ruby method names - (2010-07-28)
  [2621] Ruby collections and strings - some new examples - (2010-02-03)
  [2290] Opening and reading files - the ruby fundamentals - (2009-07-16)
  [1887] Ruby Programming Course - Saturday and Sunday - (2008-11-16)
  [1587] Some Ruby programming examples from our course - (2008-03-21)

R109 - Ruby - Strings and Regular Expressions
  [3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
  [2980] Ruby - examples of regular expressions, inheritance and polymorphism - (2010-10-02)
  [2623] Object Oriented Ruby - new examples - (2010-02-03)
  [2608] Search and replace in Ruby - Ruby Regular Expressions - (2010-01-31)
  [2295] The dog is not in trouble - (2009-07-17)
  [2293] Regular Expressions in Ruby - (2009-07-16)
  [1891] Ruby to access web services - (2008-11-16)
  [1875] What are exceptions - Python based answer - (2008-11-08)
  [1588] String interpretation in Ruby - (2008-03-21)
  [1305] Regular expressions made easy - building from components - (2007-08-16)
  [1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
  [987] Ruby v Perl - interpollating variables - (2006-12-15)
  [986] puts - opposite of chomp in Ruby - (2006-12-15)
  [970] String duplication - x in Perl, * in Python and Ruby - (2006-12-07)

Back to
Constants in Ruby

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
String to number conversion with error trapping in Ruby

Some other Articles

What are Ruby Symbols?
Comparing floating point numbers - a word of caution and a solution
Defining a static method - Java, Python and Ruby
String to number conversion with error trapping in Ruby
Neatly formatting results into a table
Constants in Ruby
The Model, View, Controller architecture (MVC) - what, why and how.
Sunday Evening, City of London
Cheat Sheet - what do you need for Ruby on Rails?
Scope of variables - important to Ruby on Rails

3603 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Public Training Courses

Running regularly at our UK training Centre.
[Schedule] - [About] - [Book]

Like this? ??