Need help with fprintf

I am using fprintf to print a table of dates, opponents, scores, and attendance. The problem is the output is not aligned considering the opponents have varying lengths so it throws off everything else. Is there a away to align each column when printing row by row? Both the dates and the opponents are strings and are left aligned but the score column consists of two float values with a dash in between and the attendances is also a float value.

what it gives me:

    date     opponent        score     attendance
   12/14/17  at Missouri     51-59     1759
   1/8/2018  LSU     76-54     2432
   2/11/2018 Vanderbilt     62-48     1721

what i want:

    date     opponent        score     attendance
   12/14/17  at Missouri     51-59     1759
   1/8/17    LSU             76-54     2432
   2/11/2018 Vanderbilt      62-48     1721

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

No. That would require that somehow MATLAB went back and changed output that was already on the screen.

What you need to do instead is figure out the maximum width each column will occupy and format each item in that column to take that width. You can do that with numbers between the '%' and the format letter in the format. For example, %7d to use 7 right-aligned digits for a decimal number. %10.4f for 10 total places including the '.' and 4 decimal places after that (so, 5 before, one decimal point, 4 after = 5+1+4 = 10) for fixed point. %10s for 10-character strings. %-10s if you want the 10 characters to be left-aligned.

[Walter Roberson]

%-16s

Answer 2

[Jeff Miller]

Yes. The basic idea is to use "blanks" to pad out the length of the opponent field on each line to some maximum width that will hold all the different opponents.