Nicely formatting output to console, specifying number of tabs

Question

I am generating a script that is outputting information to the console. The information is some kind of statistic with a value. So much like a hash.

So one value\'s

Answer 1

Provided you know the maximum length to be no more than 20 characters:

printf "%-20s %s\n", value_name, value

If you want to make it more dynamic, something like this should work nicely:

longest_key = data_hash.keys.max_by(&:length)
data_hash.each do |key, value|
  printf "%-#{longest_key.length}s %s\n", key, value
end