Re: Text Columns

I believe you would use Term::Cap to find the terminal's width. In some systems, it may be directly available as an environment variable (COLUMNS)

You would then determine the length of your longest field (in your sample case, it would be the length of the string "Wednesday", plus 3 (for the colon and the two spaces that should follow a colon), plus 2 (for the length of '12' as a string), plus the padding you want between columns (you could use tabs, too). Figure out how many will fit (if you use tabs, which means you'll have to find out how wide a tab is in your output terminal. It's usually, but not always, 8). Build a format for sprintf or printf, and loop through the hash until finished. The lengths can be determined while the hash is being built. To force left-justification of a string, use something like "%-10s".

emc

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

—Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.

Comment on Re: Text Columns

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Re^2: Text Columns by geoffeg (Acolyte) on Nov 28, 2006 at 22:29 UTC
This is what I've basically done for now. There are some edge cases that this doesn't handle (I'll explain below). I'm sorta surprised that there is no perl module to do this already so maybe it's time I wrote one. I'd like to take this even further and be able to specify formats printf-like for the values.. It gets complicated quickly when I start thinking about fancy features...	[reply]
Re^3: Text Columns by swampyankee (Parson) on Nov 28, 2006 at 22:39 UTC
Sorry my assistance was too elementary. I spend a lot of programming time dealing with i/o issues (it's not uncommon for one of my non-Perl programs to have over 75% of the SLOC dealing with i/o), and writing format statements on the fly is one of my favorite -- and oldest -- tricks in handling i/o. emc At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation. —Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.	[reply]
Re^2: Text Columns by CountZero (Bishop) on Nov 28, 2006 at 22:35 UTC
That's OK if all columns are to be of equal width, but if you want to have the maximum number of columns on the screen it gets much more complicated. I'm not even sure there exists a nice algoritm for it. I have a feeling it will get down to trial & error. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]