Padding printed output of tabular data

Man, I know this is probably dead simple, but I've got some data such as this in one file:

Artichoke

Green Globe, Imperial Star, Violetto

24" deep

Beans, Lima

Bush Baby, Bush Lima, Fordhook, Fordhook 242

12" wide x 8-10" deep

that I'd like to be able to format into a nice TSV type of table, to look something like this:

    Name  | Varieties    | Container Data
----------|------------- |-------
some data here nicely padded with even spacing and right aligned text :)

in Ruby...

can anyone help me out?

tia.

From stackoverflow

• Kernel.sprintf should get you started.

• Try String#rjust(width).

  -- MarkusQ

• This is a reasonably full example that assumes the following

  • Your list of products is contained in a file called veg.txt
  • Your data is arranged across three lines per record with the fields on consecutive lines

  I am a bit of a noob to rails so there are undoubtedly better and more elegant ways to do this

  #!/usr/bin/ruby
  
  class Vegetable
  
    @@max_name ||= 0  
    @@max_variety ||= 0  
    @@max_container ||= 0  
  
    attr_reader :name, :variety, :container
  
    def initialize(name, variety, container)
      @name = name
      @variety = variety
      @container = container  
  
      @@max_name = set_max(@name.length, @@max_name)  
      @@max_variety = set_max(@variety.length, @@max_variety)  
      @@max_container = set_max(@container.length, @@max_container)
    end
  
    def set_max(current, max)
      current > max ? current : max
    end
  
    def self.max_name  
      @@max_name  
    end  
  
    def self.max_variety  
      @@max_variety  
    end  
  
    def self.max_container()  
      @@max_container  
    end  
  
  end
  
      products = []
  
  
      File.open("veg.txt") do | file|
  
        while name = file.gets
          name = name.strip
          variety = file.gets.to_s.strip
          container = file.gets.to_s.strip
          veg = Vegetable.new(name, variety, container)
          products << veg
        end
      end
  
      format="%#{Vegetable.max_name}s\t%#{Vegetable.max_variety}s\t%#{Vegetable.max_container}s\n"
      printf(format, "Name", "Variety", "Container")
      printf(format, "----", "-------", "---------")
      products.each do |p|
          printf(format, p.name, p.variety, p.container)
      end
  

  The following sample file

  Artichoke
  Green Globe, Imperial Star, Violetto
  24" deep
  Beans, Lima
  Bush Baby, Bush Lima, Fordhook, Fordhook 242
  12" wide x 8-10" deep
  Potatoes
  King Edward, Desiree, Jersey Royal
  36" wide x 8-10" deep
  

  Produced the following output

         Name                                      Variety             Container
         ----                                      -------             ---------
    Artichoke         Green Globe, Imperial Star, Violetto              24" deep
  Beans, Lima Bush Baby, Bush Lima, Fordhook, Fordhook 242 12" wide x 8-10" deep
     Potatoes           King Edward, Desiree, Jersey Royal 36" wide x 8-10" deep
  

  The Pied Pipes : Nice one, Sweet61. I'll just change the Vegetable classname to TableFormatter or similar and then I'll have some reusable class system. Cheers! andy

  Steve Weet : I thought about this afterwards and you could override to_s in the Vegetable class to do the printing then the loop at the end would be much simpler