From: Juozas Gaigalas <juozas@...>
Date: 2006-11-16T07:05:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Fully justified/center justified output

Philip Hallstrom wrote:
>> Hi, how do I go about fully justifying/center justifying output text 
>> in ruby?
>>
>> I'm guessing I have to use sprintf but I can't seem to get it working 
>> properly, not sure of the correct "%" characters (don't know the 
>> proper name for them).
>
> http://corelib.rubyonrails.org/classes/String.html#M001536
>
>   str.center(integer, padstr) => new_str
>
> If integer is greater than the length of str, returns a new String of 
> length integer with str centered and padded with padstr; otherwise, 
> returns str.
>
>    "hello".center(4)         #=> "hello"
>    "hello".center(20)        #=> "       hello        "
>    "hello".center(20, '123') #=> "1231231hello12312312"
>
>
If you're printing to terminal, you'll need to know the terminal width 
before use can use String#center. This is simple in Windows because 
cmd.exe terminal is fixed-width. In Linux and OSX this is more 
complicated. The easiest way I know is this:

require "curses"

width = Curses::cols
"hello".center(width)

It's not totally clear from your post if this is what you're trying to 
do, but if it is I hope this works you.