Align unicode text in terminal window using default monospace font

Question

I am pulling data from the web and want to align it in a table in a terminal window. I can align the text fine in most cases but when the text contains certain symbols or f

Answer 1

The special behaviour for those particular characters can be identified using the East Asian width property from their Unicode data. Taking the suggestion from Programmatically tell if a Unicode character takes up more than one character space in a terminal and using that value for alignment:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import unicodedata

items = "Apple tree", "Banana plant", "Orange 으르", "Goodbye"
values = 100, 200, 300, 400
for i, v in zip(items, values):
    eawid = len(i) + sum(1 for v in i if unicodedata.east_asian_width(v) == 'W')
    pad = ' ' * (15 - eawid)
    print("%s%s : %-4s" % (i, pad, v))

gives:

Apple tree      : 100 
Banana plant    : 200 
Orange 으르     : 300 
Goodbye         : 400 

This may appear misaligned if your browser is using a 1.5-width glyph for those characters; in my terminal, plan is exactly the same width as 으르.

Syntax here is Python 3, but the same technique works in 2.7.