How to make pretty tabfiles?

sidsel

I'm trying to make a logfile looking something like this:

Username(tab)(tab)IP(tab)time(tab)etc....

I want the data stored in a .txt file and have pretty columns.

Depending on the length of the username either 1,2 or 3 tabs should be inserted after the username to make the columns pretty and not broken.

But how do I figure out how many tabs I need to insert after the username? Is a tab = 5 spaces or?

rajavel

use "\t" like this

$str = "Username\t\tIP\ttime\t"

sidsel

I know how to make a tab, my question is how to find out how many tabs I need to insert to make pretty columns....

Ex:

Username|IP|Time|

shortuser\t\t\t\tIP ..

verylongusernameneed\tIP ..

Long usernames only require like one tab but short ones need 2-3 tabs.

My question was how to find out how many tabs I need to insert after a username.

Weedpacket

Depends on how long a tab is. That depends on the application being used to view the file and the user's preferences. 4 spaces per tab is common, but so is 8. No doubt other people use other values (I've seen text files which I suspect were written with a 6-space-per-tab convention).

ASCII artists came up with the term "tab damage" to describe what happens when the application writing a file and the application reading it have different ideas about how wide a tab is.

Roger_Ramjet

And then you need a fixed size font like Courier when you view it or the columns will just wander around the page according to the spelling.