Printing an ASCII table

[chops]

Im trying to print out an ASCII table using the \t (horizontal tab)...thing is is that it doesn't seem to format the table very well...if some cells are small then the titles don't line up above the contents. Here is what I am using to print out:

echo "<PRE>\nDate\tLot #\tCivic #\tAddress\tW/O #\tMeter Size\tInstaller\n";
$rows = count($date);
$row = 0;
while ($row <= $rows) {
echo "" . $date[$row] . "\t" . $lot[$row] . "\t" . $civic[$row] . "\t" . $address[$row] . "\t" . $wo[$row] . "\t" . $meter_size[$row] . "\t" . $installer[$row] . "\n";
next($date);
next($lot);
next($civic);
next($address);
next($wo);
next($meter_size);
next($installer);
$row++;
}
echo "</PRE>";

[chops]

you can see the page here: www.magform.com/slumber.php

[brandonschnell]

the tab under most browsers just goes to the next tab point but makes no effort to line up the text.

you'll probably need to use a table here, just hide the table border.

if you must make this line up in ascii, then find the longest possible data length. Use your own function to pad (rather than \t) the strings.

[Anon]

How do people get nice looking ACSII tables with data centered in colums and stuff like that?.....Can I dump an ACSII output from MySQL if I input the data in there?

[brandonschnell]

1) make sure you're using a monospace font

2) make sure you wrap it between <PRE> </PRE> tags if its on a web page

3) tabs might be able to align data, but there isn't any guarantee that they will. just make sure that you give enough space between the columns using the tabs.