Perl create a formatted table without using an object - perl

Question

I want to simply output some results in a table without there being any offset problems. Do not worry about the foreach and the output of values that is just pseudocode for clarity.
print "\n ______________________________________________________";
print "\n | |";
print "\n | Title |";
print "\n +______________________________________________________+";
print "\n | | |";
print "\n | City | Size |";
print "\n |__________________________|___________________________|";
#Sort by highest scores
################################
foreach (city, size)
{
print "\n | (city(value)";
print "| (size(value)";
}
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

It's rarely used anymore, but Perl has the built in ability to create these type of forms.
Basically, you use a specification to state how you want these tables formatted, and where information in these tables will be placed using the format statement. Then, you use the Perl write statement to write to that format. You can specify headers and footers of your tables too.

Answer 2

I suggest you use
substr
to overwrite the correct portion of a template line.
use strict;
use warnings;
my %data = (
Birmingham => 1_000_000,
Bristol => 430_000,
Manchester => 110_000,
);
print " ______________________________________________________\n";
print " | |\n";
print " | Title |\n";
print " +______________________________________________________+\n";
my $template =
" | | |\n";
print $template;
while (my ($city, $size) = each %data) {
my $line = $template;
substr $line, 12, length $city, $city;
substr $line, 39, length $size, $size;
print $line;
}
print " |__________________________|___________________________|\n";
output
______________________________________________________
| |
| Title |
+______________________________________________________+
| | |
| Bristol | 430000 |
| Manchester | 110000 |
| Birmingham | 1000000 |
|__________________________|___________________________|