How to right-align columns content in reStructuredText simple tables?

Question

I\'m editing the documentation for a project of mine using Sphinx, which in turn uses reStructuredText as markup language.

I have a simple table (as opposed to

Answer 1

While it appears that ReST doesn't actually support cell content alignment, you can actually use line-blocks within your cell to enforce preservation of whitespace to effectively pad your cell's content.

You'll have to use some of the unicode-whitespace characters (e.g. U+2001 - EM QUAD) and have them preceded by a normal space character (U+0020) i.e. U+0020U+2001Your String to stop the ReST parser complaining about malformed tables and unterminated substitution references, etc.

+--------+---------+
| String | Num     |
+========+=========+
| foo    ||   12.00|   # second cell's content is actually |12.00
+--------+---------+
| bar    ||    3.01|
+--------+---------+
| baz    ||    4.99|
+--------+---------+
| moo    ||   15.99|
+--------+---------+
| quux   ||   33.49|
+--------+---------+
| foo    ||   20.00|
+--------+---------+
| bar    ||  100.00|
+--------+---------+

Tables like the above start to look a bit awkward and are awkward to maintain but the approach gets the job done. It also goes without saying, you'll need to both edit and generate UTF-8 output. While rst2html.py treats this well, I'm not sure how sphinx deals with this and if it can, whether the alignment remains when generating non-HTML documents.