how to print formatted output on terminal using C?

Question

I have written a code for a Library system in C. And I want to show the output in following manner on terminal on Linux. I tried with "\\t" but the output gets disturbed when the string size varies. I want to print it in fixed manner no matter what string size comes.

I want to print output like below-

I tried to print this using "\\t" but the format gets disturbed when the string length of book or author gets smaller or larger. Can somebody help me with this??

Answer 1

Print with fixed character size. Here it is 7,11 and 10 for columns. Refer this for more details this

printf("Column1    Column2   Column3\n");
printf("%7d%11s%10d\n", 100, "String1", 9348);
printf("%7d%11s%10d\n", 23, "String2", 214);

Answer 2

not a linux user (hope we are talking about monospace output) but my experienceis that tab has usually configurable size so if you format for 6 character length and someone have 4 character tab the result will be bad. The safest is to use spaces. You can use formated output like:

printf("float number: 8.3%f",7.56);

But that is not always a good choice for example sometimes negative sign mess up things ...

I usually handle such formatting my self with use of string variables:

1. line = ""
2. item = "single unformated text value"
3. compute length of item
4. add missing spaces (before or after) to line or item
5. add item to line
6. loop #2 for all items
7. output line
8. loop #1 for all lines

Answer 3

use printf like this :

printf("%-25s|\n", "a string");
printf("%-25s|\n", "another string");

(the - in %-25s is use to left-justifies your text)