php generate data from foreach loop on txt file with table formatted

Question

I had tried to generate txt file from php foreach loop, it works but the result is not parallel like if used table here:

My expectation like this :

This is my code :

        $output[] = ''."\n".'';
    $output[] = '  No  '.'                    Name Product                    '.'    Total   '."\n".'';
    foreach($query->result() as $row){
       $results = $row->id_product; 
       $product = $this->db->query("select product_name from master_product WHERE product_id='".$results."'");
       $product_name = $product->row()->product_name;
       $output[] = '  '.$no.str_repeat(" ",20).''. $product_name.str_repeat(" ",20).''.$row->quantity.'  '.$row->scale."\n".'';
       $no++;
    }
    file_put_contents(APPPATH."txt/test.txt", $output);

Please someone help me.

Answer 1

Why don't you implement a function like this:

function padColumnText($text, $colWidth)
{
    if (strlen($text) > $colWidth)
    {
        return substr($text, 0, $colWidth);
    }
    return $text . str_repeat(" ", $colWidth - strlen($text));
}

Then, any time you want to print a column, do it like this:

output[] = padColumnText($no, 5) . padColumnText($product_name, 20) ...

I'm assuming you want this printed to some kind of plain text file with a fixed width font. If you're doing something for the web, this is the wrong approach (you should use HTML for your formatting).