Hello monks,

This seemingly simple problem frustrated me enough to sign up as a new user just to ask your opinions! I am no stranger to perl, but am a beginner incorporating TK into my scripts...

My problem is that I have a TK listbox which I am using to display search results of a database. The catch is that each result contains a "short title" and a "description", each of varying lengths. I want each line in the listbox to display the short title followed by the description. I can easily do this with various forms of concatenation, however the differing character lengths make for a "jagged" and ugly listing.

The obvious answer would be to use a tab (\t) in between, but the listbox doesn't seem to recognize escape sequences and instead displays their regex (xism?) equivalent?? I have looked everywhere for some listbox-specific tab, but as it doesn't use TK::text as a base I don't think it supports insertTab()? I don't see this problem when using ROText.

EXAMPLE:

my $text1 = "cherry\tred fruit";
my $text2 = "carrot\torange vegetable";
$lb->insert('end', $text1, $text2);

[download]
displays (literally): 
cherry\x{9}red fruit
carrot\x{9}orange vegetable

[download]
What is the "\x{9}"?? How do I use escape sequences / regex with listbox?? Thanks!!

Thanks for the input folks. sprintf was a good idea, but no luck; it still printed the \x{9} equivalent. I had briefly read about HList, but didn't want to go through the trouble of changing the widget. I think I'll try that now.

Until then, I have temporarily kludged it for our users haha:

my $string1 = "cherry";
my $string2 = "a red fruit";
my $spaces  = 30 - length($string1);
my $text    = sprintf("%-${spaces}s\%s\%s",$string1,$string2);

[download]

In reply to TK listbox escape text by jbuck

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