Examples Using printf

Here is how to use printf to make an aligned table:

awk '{ printf "%-10s %s\n", $1, $2 }' BBS-list

prints the names of bulletin boards ($1) of the file `BBS-list' as a string of 10 characters, left justified. It also prints the phone numbers ($2) afterward on the line. This produces an aligned two-column table of names and phone numbers:

$ awk '{ printf "%-10s %s\n", $1, $2 }' BBS-list
-| aardvark   555-5553
-| alpo-net   555-3412
-| barfly     555-7685
-| bites      555-1675
-| camelot    555-0542
-| core       555-2912
-| fooey      555-1234
-| foot       555-6699
-| macfoo     555-6480
-| sdace      555-3430
-| sabafoo    555-2127

Did you notice that we did not specify that the phone numbers be printed as numbers? They had to be printed as strings because the numbers are separated by a dash. If we had tried to print the phone numbers as numbers, all we would have gotten would have been the first three digits, `555'. This would have been pretty confusing.

We did not specify a width for the phone numbers because they are the last things on their lines. We don't need to put spaces after them.

We could make our table look even nicer by adding headings to the tops of the columns. To do this, we use the BEGIN pattern (see section The BEGIN and END Special Patterns) to force the header to be printed only once, at the beginning of the awk program:

awk 'BEGIN { print "Name      Number"
             print "----      ------" }
     { printf "%-10s %s\n", $1, $2 }' BBS-list

Did you notice that we mixed print and printf statements in the above example? We could have used just printf statements to get the same results:

awk 'BEGIN { printf "%-10s %s\n", "Name", "Number"
             printf "%-10s %s\n", "----", "------" }
     { printf "%-10s %s\n", $1, $2 }' BBS-list

By printing each column heading with the same format specification used for the elements of the column, we have made sure that the headings are aligned just like the columns.

The fact that the same format specification is used three times can be emphasized by storing it in a variable, like this:

awk 'BEGIN { format = "%-10s %s\n"
             printf format, "Name", "Number"
             printf format, "----", "------" }
     { printf format, $1, $2 }' BBS-list

See if you can use the printf statement to line up the headings and table data for our `inventory-shipped' example covered earlier in the section on the print statement (see section The print Statement).

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