Re: [Chicken-users] Columnar text display code?

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 07:55:05AM +0200, foobar wrote:
> Robin Lee Powell schrieb:
> > Someone *must* have written this.  Probably lots of someones.
> > May I have your code?
> >
> > The problem is (very) simple.  I have:
> >
> > (("foo" "1" "bar") ("baz" "baaaaaaaaz" "2"))
> >
> > I wish to output (something like):
> >
> >  foo  1           bar
> >  baz  baaaaaaaaz  2
> >
> > That is, given a list of lists of strings and a given screen
> > width, pad the strings appropriately and join them, returning a
> > list of strings.
> 
> As the others allready suggested the fmt egg does this and many
> things more.

The "columnar" formatter in fmt fails totally on my dataset:
"The current column width is divided evenly among the columns", but
one of my columns is 2 characters wide and one of the others over a
hundred, so it looks horrible and isn't truncated at all:

ID                       Artist                   Title                    
Bitrate                  URL
18                       Basil Poledouris         Starship Troopers - 
Klendathu128000                   
file:///var/tmp/xmms2test/Basil-Poledouris--Starship_Troopers--Klendathu_Drop.mp3
19                       No Artist                RedDawn-MainTitle        
128000                   
file:///var/tmp/xmms2test/Basil_Poledouris--Red_Dawn--Main_Title.mp3
21                       King Kong & D.Jungle GirlsBoom Boom Dollar         
160000                   
file:///var/tmp/xmms2test/Dance_Dance_Revolution--Boom_Boom_Dollar.mp3
22                       Daniel Beddingfield      Gotta Get Through This   
128000                   
file:///var/tmp/xmms2test/Daniel_Beddingfield--Gotta_Get_Through_This.mp3

What I'd *like* is for columns to use no more than their max width
(plus one or two pad chars) and for the right-most column to be
truncated.

It may be that fmt-columns would help, but the explanation of
fmt-columns is *totally* opaque to me; can anyone explain it?

-Robin