[Tutor] String format question

[andy surany]

I hadn't thought about the proportional font issue - and you guys are
right, it probably will cause some alignment problems.

My original thought was to take care of all of the formatting before
sending the string. I may need to rethink that strategy......

I will do some research into what Tk will provide me - and try what you
suggest Jeff.

I will also take a look at TList as Magnus has suggested.

Thanks for your help.

Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Shannon <jeff@ccvcorp.com>
To: andy surany <mongo57a@comcast.net>
Cc: tutor@python.org <tutor@python.org>
Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Tutor] String format question


>andy surany wrote:
>
>> Thanks Jeff.
>>
>> Maybe I can explain it a little better....
>>
>> I am obtaining data from multiple databases. Any data which is not in
>> character format is converted. The data is then formatted into a
single
>> string which is displayed in a scrolled list.
>
>Okay, then my suggestion about a list of tuples is probably not worth
the
>effort.  Figured I'd mention the possibility anyhow.
>
>
>> I tried using the string formatting operator as well as .ljust. The
>> problem is that these are true "formatting" controls - which are good
>> for print, etc. But they are invalid (lost) when concatenating a
string.
>> Or at least they are lost the way that I have tried to do it.....
>
>If you use string formatting as I showed, then you end up with a single
>string (or rather, a list of strings) with enough spaces added to start
each
>element at the same position.  This is, as near as I can tell, exactly
what
>you say you want.
>
>>>> a = ['aaa', 'a', 'aa']
>>>> b = ['b', 'bb', 'bbb']
>>>> c = ['cc', 'ccc', 'c']
>>>> nrecs = len(a)
>>>> optionlist = ["%-5s %-5s %-5s" % (a[i], b[i], c[i]) for i in
>range(nrecs)]
>>>> for line in optionlist:
>...  print line
>...
>aaa   b     cc
>a     bb    ccc
>aa    bbb   c
>>>>
>
>Count 'em, each 'c' begins at the 12th character.
>
>Next question, then, would be how is your data being displayed?  Does
this
>ScrolledList control use a proportional font, maybe?  If so, then no
amount
>of text-based formatting is going to give you even columns.  (Spaces
will be
>narrower than most printable characters, and even those will vary in
width,
>so predicting how many spaces need to be added to make different lines
fall
>into place is very difficult.)  You'll have to use the GUI functions of
the
>list control, or use several linked controls.  (Unless, of course, you
can
>coerce the control into using a fixed-width font...)  What toolkit are
you
>getting this ScrolledList from?
>
>Jeff Shannon
>Technician/Programmer
>Credit International
>
>