Printed length of a string in python

Question

Is there any way to find (even a best guess) the \"printed\" length of a string in python? E.g. \'potaa\\bto\' is 8 characters in len but only 6 characters wide pr

Answer 1

The printed length of a string depends on the type of the string.

Normal strings in python 2.x are in utf-8. The length of utf-8 is equal to the bytes in String. Change the type to unicode, len() delivers now printed signs. So Formatting works:

value = 'abcäöücdf'
len_value  = len(value)
len_uvalue = len(unicode(value,'utf-8'))
size = self['size'] + len_value-len_uvalue
print value[:min(len(value),size)].ljust(size)