Creating a tabular display when displaying outputs

Question

I want to create a tabular display that has a name, ID, course year and GPA and have the spacing in the name and courses to be based on the longest name and course there is

I tried using align specifiers, but it can be hard to just assume that the longest name available would be the same each time the program is run

Answer 1

You will need to iterate through your data to figure out the width of each column:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define MAX(a, b) (a) >= (b) ? (a) : (b)

int main() {
    char *data[] = {"what", "is", "the", "secret?" };
    size_t w = 0;
    for(size_t i = 0; i < sizeof data / sizeof *data; i++) {
        size_t tmp = strlen(data[i]);
        w = MAX(w, tmp);
    }
    for(size_t i = 0; i < sizeof data / sizeof *data; i++)
        printf("| %*s |\n", (int) w, data[i]);
}

and here is the corresponding output:

|    what |
|      is |
|     the |
| secret? |