How to print a table of arrays?

Question

I\'m here to see if anyone would be able to help out with the problem.

I\'m trying to print a table out which would look something like this

Answer 1

I know this post is very old but, because I often fall in this question, probably because on internet it is watched by many people, I finally wanted to publish my aswer to it.

I wrote a very simple class that uses the String.format method to format a generic table of objects:

public class TableFormatter {
    private int columns;
    private List cells = new LinkedList<>();
    private int minSpacesBetweenCells = 4;
    private boolean alignLeft = true;
    private int maxLength = 0;

    public TableFormatter(int columns) {
        this.columns = columns;
    }

    public TableFormatter insert(Object... cells) {
        for (Object content : cells) {
            String cell = content.toString();
            maxLength = Math.max(maxLength, cell.length());
            this.cells.add(cell);
        }
        return this;
    }

    public TableFormatter setMinSpacesBetweenCells(int minSpacesBetweenCells) {
        this.minSpacesBetweenCells = minSpacesBetweenCells;
        return this;
    }

    public TableFormatter alignCellsToRight() {
        this.alignLeft = false;
        return this;
    }

    public TableFormatter alignCellsToLeft() {
        this.alignLeft = true;
        return this;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        String format = "%";
        if (alignLeft)
            format += "-";
        format += maxLength + "s";

        String spaces = new String(new char[minSpacesBetweenCells]).replace("\0", " ");

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        int row = 0;
        int currentColumn = 0;
        for (String cell : cells) {
            if (currentColumn == 0) {
                if (row > 0)
                    sb.append("\n");
            } else {
                sb.append(spaces);
            }

            sb.append(String.format(format, cell));

            currentColumn = (currentColumn + 1) % columns;
            if (currentColumn == 0)
                row++;
        }

        return sb.toString();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        TableFormatter tableFormatter = new TableFormatter(3);

        tableFormatter.insert("column1", "column2", "column3");
        tableFormatter.insert("e11", 12, "e13");
        tableFormatter.insert("e21", "e22", 23);
        tableFormatter.insert(3.1d, "e32", "e33");
        tableFormatter.insert("e41", "e42", true);

        System.out.println(tableFormatter);
    }
}

See the main method at the bottom of the class. It produces the following output:

column1    column2    column3
e11        12         e13    
e21        e22        23     
3.1        e32        e33    
e41        e42        true   

I hope this will be useful to next visitors of this post.