Set Tab Positions Before Writing To A File

[dickieknee]

I would like to set a number of different tabs so that when i write the text to the file then it will all be aligned

so if one colum has more than 16 characters and the next row in the same colums only has 2 characters then the next colum will not be aligned as the second row will tab to the first tab and the first row will tab to the second tab

ie

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

i would like to set the tab positions so it looks like this

tab1 tab2

position position

set here set here

| |

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

sorry i have no code ideas on how to do this

thanks in advance

[seandisanti]

I would like to set a number of different tabs so that when i write the text to the file then it will all be aligned

so if one colum has more than 16 characters and the next row in the same colums only has 2 characters then the next colum will not be aligned as the second row will tab to the first tab and the first row will tab to the second tab

ie

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

i would like to set the tab positions so it looks like this

tab1 tab2

position position

set here set here

| |

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

sorry i have no code ideas on how to do this

thanks in advance

it sounds like you're trying to do a fixed width text file, the easiest way to do it (assuming you have all of your output in an array before writing it) would be to just figure out which element from each column has the most characters. then add spaces to each of the shorter elements until each element is the length of the longest plus a space or two gap. does that make sense?

[dickieknee]

it sounds like you're trying to do a fixed width text file, the easiest way to do it (assuming you have all of your output in an array before writing it) would be to just figure out which element from each column has the most characters. then add spaces to each of the shorter elements until each element is the length of the longest plus a space or two gap. does that make sense?

yes thanks it does make sense, though i had hoped there may have been a way to set the tabs, this would have made the execution a tad faster

[billmez]

I would like to set a number of different tabs so that when i write the text to the file then it will all be aligned

so if one colum has more than 16 characters and the next row in the same colums only has 2 characters then the next colum will not be aligned as the second row will tab to the first tab and the first row will tab to the second tab

ie

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

i would like to set the tab positions so it looks like this

tab1 tab2

position position

set here set here

| |

Col1 header Col2 header Col3 header

text1ishereto text2ishere text3ishere

text1 text2 text 3

sorry i have no code ideas on how to do this

thanks in advance

$output &= "Col1 header" & @TAB & "Col2 header" & @TAB & "Col3 header" & @CRLF
$output &= text1ishereto" & @TAB & "text2ishere" & @TAB & "text3ishere" & @CRLF
$output &= text1" & @TAB & "text2" & @TAB & "text 3" & @CRLF

FileWrite($FHandle, $output)

Keep in mind that you may have to check the length of the output and headers, and if the output length is greater than the header length, add another tab to keep the alignment. To do that you would append the output to the output vatiable, and write the header line afterwards, then combine the adjusted header line with the output variable, and write to the file.