string = ""
name = raw_input() #The value at the field
length = input() #the length of the field
string += name
string += " "*(length-len(name)) # Add extra spaces
This will add the number of spaces needed, provided the field has length >= the length of the name provided
Note that if the name is longer than 15 characters, ljust won't truncate it. If you want to end up with exactly 15 characters, you can slice the resulting string:
I know this is a bit of an old question, but I've ended up making my own little class for it.
Might be useful to someone so I'll stick it up. I used a class variable, which is inherently persistent, to ensure sufficient whitespace was added to clear any old lines. See below:
2021-03-02 update: Improved a bit - when working through a large codebase, you know whether the line you are writing is one you care about or not, but you don't know what was previously written to the console and whether you want to retain it.
This update takes care of that, a class variable you update when writing to the console keeps track of whether the line you are currently writing is one you want to keep, or allow overwriting later on.
class consolePrinter():
'''
Class to write to the console
Objective is to make it easy to write to console, with user able to
overwrite previous line (or not)
'''
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
#Class variables
stringLen = 0
overwriteLine = False
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
def writeline(stringIn, overwriteThisLine=False):
import sys
#Get length of stringIn and update stringLen if needed
if len(stringIn) > consolePrinter.stringLen:
consolePrinter.stringLen = len(stringIn)+1
ctrlString = "{:<"+str(consolePrinter.stringLen)+"}"
prevOverwriteLine = consolePrinter.overwriteLine
if prevOverwriteLine:
#Previous line entry can be overwritten, so do so
sys.stdout.write("\r" + ctrlString.format(stringIn))
else:
#Previous line entry cannot be overwritten, take a new line
sys.stdout.write("\n" + stringIn)
sys.stdout.flush()
#Update the class variable for prevOverwriteLine
consolePrinter.overwriteLine = overwriteThisLine
return
Which then is called via:
consolePrinter.writeline("text here", True)
If you want this line to be overwriteable
consolePrinter.writeline("text here",False)
if you don't.
Note, for it to work right, all messages pushed to the console would need to be through consolePrinter.writeline.
You can use rjust and ljust functions to add specific characters before or after a string to reach a specific length.
The first parameter those methods is the total character number after transforming the string.
I generally recommend the f-string/format version, but sometimes you have a tuple, need, or want to use printf-style instead. I did this time and decided to use this:
>>> res = (1280, 720)
>>> '%04sx%04s' % res
'1280x 720'
Thought it was a touch more readable than the format version: