There is a handy module on CPAN called Data::ShowTable, which provides the pretty borders and handles a lot of the busywork of formatting the table output, but using it effectively for this sort of thing still involves some work -- you have to tell it what the maximum column widths are that you want for your table (and if you hand it data that doesn't fit within those widths, it will do an adequate, readable, but not-so-pretty job if wrapping the contents within a table cell, so no information is lost). Here's a relevant sample of usage -- I never used this module before, and I figured out the example based on reading the man page (so the documentation for this module is good): 
use Data::ShowTable;

my @AoA = (
  [ qw/id user_lvl first_name last_name surname homepage/ ],
  [ '1', '50', 'unknownlengh', '', ' ', 'none' ],
  [ qw/5000 0 Joe Papadakolopolous AlsoTooLong www.younameit.org/ ],
);

my $header = shift @AoA;  # extract the column labels to a separate ar
+ray
# You can set "default" column widths to be the lengths of
# the column header strings, like this:

my @colwidth = map { length() } @$header;

# If you don't do at least that much work to initialize
# column widths, you probably won't like the output.


# figure out the maximum data widths for each column; these will have 
+an
# effect on output when they happen to be wider than the corresponding
# column header string:

my @colwidth;
for $row ( @AoA ) {
    for ( $col=0; $col<@$row; $col++ ) {
        my $l = length( $$row[$col] );
        $colwidth[$col] = $l if ( $colwidth[$col] < $l );
    }
}

# Note that the args this and other ShowTable methods are all REFERENC
+ES:

ShowBoxTable $header, [qw/int int text text text text/], \@colwidth, \
+&rowsub;

# Here's the sub that ShowTable needs so that it can fetch
# one row of data per call:

sub rowsub {
    my $arg = shift;

    if ( $arg ) {
        return;
    } elsif ( scalar @AoA ) {
        my $rowref = shift @AoA;
        return (@$rowref);
    } else {
        return;
    }
}

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In reply to Re: structured printing of arrays by graff
in thread structured printing of arrays by hacker_j99

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