Color escape codes in pretty printed columns

Question

I have a tab-delimited text file which I send to column to \"pretty print\" a table.

Original file:

1blablablabla

        

Answer 1

A solution using printf to format the ouput as well :

while IFS=$'\t' read -r c1 c2 c3; do
    tput setaf 1; printf '%-10s' "$c1"
    tput setaf 2; printf '%-30s' "$c2"
    tput setaf 3; printf '%-30s' "$c3"
    tput sgr0; echo
done < file