在PrintWriter中使用printf（）可变字符串宽度

Question

I am trying to achieve even indentation in my output. So that even if the strings vary in length, the width between the strings will continue to match. What I mean is if I want to print a text file with a person's first name, age, and weight, but I want the indentation to remain even

Ryan       1          1
Alexander 25        180
Ashish P. 51        217
Ben       19        130

I know that a fixed width will not work because the name can be very long or short

writer.printf("%s%10d%10d", name, age, weight);

I am doing this using the PrintWriter.printf(), although I imagine it applies to System.out.printf() and .format() as well.

Answer 1

You may try to use tabulators to separate each field (\\t char).

writer.printf("%s\t%d\t%d", name, age, weight);

But this may not work well, if the difference between length of shortest and longest name is bigger then the tabulator size. In this case you are out of luck and you will have to implement the logic yourself.