Best way to have a formatted output with Perl - perl

Question

I want to output strings into eight columns, but I want to keep the spacing the same. I don't want to do it in HTML, but I am not sure how to do it normally. Example:
Something Something Something Something Something
Else Else Else Else Else
Another Another Another Another Another
The amount of rows will change daily, but the column number will always stay the same. What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

printf
printf "%-11s %-11s %-11s %-11s %-11s %-11s %-11s %-11s\n",
$column1, $column2, ..., $column8;
Change "11" in the template to whatever value you need.

Answer 2

You could use Perl's format.
This is probably the "complicated" method that you don't understand, most likely because it gives you many options (left|center|right justification/padding, leading 0's, etc).
Perldoc Example:
Example:
format STDOUT =
#<<<<<< #|||||| #>>>>>>
"left", "middle", "right"
.
Output:
left middle right
Here's another tutorial.
Working Example: (Codepad)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
sub main{
my #arr = (['something1','something2','something3','something4','something5','something6','something7','something8']
,['else1' ,'else2' ,'else3' ,'else4' ,'else5' ,'else6' ,'else7' ,'else8' ]
,['another1' ,'another2' ,'another3' ,'another4' ,'another5' ,'another6' ,'another7' ,'another8' ]
);
for my $row (#arr) {
format STDOUT =
#<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<< #<<<<<<<<<<<<
#$row
.
write;
}
}
main();

Answer 3

Here is a live example of Perl6::Form:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Perl6::Form;
my #arr = (
[1..8],
[9..16],
[17..24],
);
foreach my $line (#arr) {
print form
"{<<<<<} "x8,
#{$line};
}
It will output:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Answer 4

I would look at formatting, but I would do it using Perl 6's (now Raku) Form.pm, which you can obtain as Perl6::Form for Perl 5.
The reason for this is that the format builtin has a number of drawbacks, such as having the format statically defined at compile time (i.e., building it dynamically can be painful and usually requires string eval), along with a whole list of other shortcomings, such as lack of useful field types (and you can't extend these in Perl 5).