How can I clean up misaligned columns in text?

Question

I have a C program that outputs two columns, utterly misaligned. The reason for the misalignment is lengths of words in the first column are very different.

I have an o

Answer 1

For a quick-and-dirty fix, pipe it through column:

your_program | column -t

If you need to include spaces in the column data, then delimit the fields with some character such as "|" and:

your_program | column -t -s "|"

You can use any character for a delimiter and specify it with the -s switch. Control characters are possible but a little trickier to work with.

But as Jay mentioned you're better off fixing your program to format the output properly.