Strange tab problem!

[Peter Otten]

tjland at iserv.net wrote:

> for x in title_author.keys():
>         print "Book: ",x," \tAuthor: ",title_author[x],"
> \tCopyright:",title_copyright[x]
> 
> it seems that whenever i go over six characters it adds another tab. Is
> there a preset field limit to six bytes. What is happening? Thanx in
> advance.

Note that Python inserts a space between the arguments of a print statement.
So you *always* get (replacing space with "S" and tab with "T")
 
"Book:SSxSS(book title):SSTAuthor:SS(author name)TCopyright:S(year)"
 123456789a(book title)123

How this is displayed, depends on your editor settings. Assuming 1 tab == 8
spaces:

"Tb"          -> "SSSSSSSSb"
"1Tb"         -> "1SSSSSSSb"
"12Tb"        -> "12SSSSSSb"
...
"1234567Tb"   -> "1234567Sb"
"12345678Tb"  -> "12345678SSSSSSSSb" 

So every time you reach the 8 character limit, another tab appears to be
(but is not!) inserted. Solution: 

(1) do not use tabs, and
(2) calculate column widths before printing

title_author = {"For whom the bell tolls": "Hemingway",
                "Zauberberg": "Mann"}
title_copyright = {"For whom the bell tolls": 1234,
                   "Zauberberg": 123}

titleWidth = max(map(len, title_author.keys()))
authorWidth = max(map(len, title_author.values()))
copyrightWidth = max(map(lambda y: len(str(y)), title_copyright.values()))

for title in title_author.keys():
    ptitle = title.ljust(titleWidth)
    pauthor = title_author[title].ljust(authorWidth)
    pcopyright = str(title_copyright[title]).rjust(copyrightWidth)

    print "Book:", ptitle, "Author:", pauthor, "Copyright", pcopyright

The generalization for arbitrary tables (and finding out the samples' years
of publication) is left as an exercise to the OP  :-)

Peter