How can I properly align UTF-8 strings with Perl's printf?

Question

what is the right way to get here a beautiful output ( all lines the same indent )?

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use DBI;

my $phone_book =          


        

Answer 1

You can't use Unicode with printf if you have code points that take 0 or 2 print columns instead of 1, which it appears you do.

You need to use Unicode::GCString instead.

Wrong way:

printf "%-10.10s", our $string;

Right way:

use Unicode::GCString;

my $gcstring = Unicode::GCString->new(our $string);
my $colwidth = $gcstring->columns();
if ($colwidth > 10) {
    print $gcstring->substr(0,10);
} else {
    print " " x (10 - $colwidth);
    print $gcstring;
}