How can I clean up misaligned columns in text?

Question

I have a C program that outputs two columns, utterly misaligned. The reason for the misalignment is lengths of words in the first column are very different.

I have an o

Answer 1

I wrote a small program that solves this problem using Perl. It also works for multiple columns.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $sep = 2;

sub max {
    my ($a,$b) = @_;
    return $a > $b ? $a : $b;
}

my @rows;
my $cols;
my $max = 0;

while (<>) {
    next if m/^\s*$/;
    my (@cols) = split m'\s+';

    for (@cols) {
        $max = max($max, length);
    }

    $cols = @cols;
    push @rows, \@cols;
}

for (@rows) {
    my $str = join '', (('%-' . ($max+$sep) . 's') x $cols);
    $str .= "\n";
    printf $str, @$_;
}