Myujth

I often do things like this on the command line:

<?php

 echo 'Short description:' . "tttttt" . '123' . "n";
 echo 'A slightly longer description:' . "tttttt" . '321' . "n";

?>

These will no longer "match up"; "123" and "321" will not be on the same "column":

This is what I want

This is what I don't want

Is there any sane way to get around this problem? I always used to think that the whole point of the "tabulator" was to achieve this effect, but clearly it's not? Or have I misunderstood it somehow?

Here is one method.

Maybe not as simple as you expected but it works.

I use the full string and find the longest description and use that as the base.

$str = "Short description: t 123
A slightly longer description: t 321";

$arr = explode ("n", $str);
foreach($arr as $line)
 // Create new array with str_len as one item
 $parts = explode("t", $line);
 $new = ['desc' => $parts[0], 'num' => $parts[1], 'len' => strlen($parts[0])];

// Find max length in array
$pad = max(array_column($new, 'len'))+1;

// Output it
foreach($new as $sub)
 echo str_pad($sub['desc'], $pad, " ") . "t" . $sub['num'] . "n";

Output:

Short description: 123
A slightly longer description: 321

https://3v4l.org/s1DAD