I'm struggling with a formatting issue that comes from inserting text into a Text Element object in ArcGIS using Python. I want to print a table of values of which all but the last column are numbers. My python script loops through a list and applies formatting to each element like this:
#Text element is referenced:
tableTextQuad1 = arcpy.mapping.ListLayoutElements(mxd, "TEXT_ELEMENT", "tableTextQuad1")[0]
#All of the work occurs within a function that takes the table, x postion, y position, and text element reference (txtBox1) as its arguments)
#A clone of the element is created and used by the newCellText
newCellText = txtBox1.clone("_clone")
#A for loop is used to loop through lines in a table, and each line is formatted like so:
reformat1 = '{:>3} {:>6.2f} {:>3} {:>7.2f} {:>7.2f} {:<10}'.format(t[0], t[1], t[2], t[3], t[4], t[5])
myList.append(reformat1)
myList.append('\n')
#To get rid of commas I do the following:
alpha = "', '".join(myList).replace("', '", "")
#Then the alpha string is sent to the cloned text object
newCellText.text = '{:}'.format(alpha)
newCellText.elementPositionX = x1
newCellText.elementPositionY = y1
When I don't include the last element (t[5]) the table looks great...like this:
But as soon as I try adding the string t[5] (which are directions like North, South...) to the line everything in the line gets shifted and seems to ignore the width and character spacing allocation I set in .format(). The result looks like this:
I've tried many different formatting parameters for t[5] but nothing seems to work the way I want it. Can anyone tell me why all the numbers would adhere to formatting rules like right/left justify and width but the inclusion of letters on the same line messes it all up? What is the correct formatting I should use? Many thanks in advance for help!
*Update - I have also tried adding a carriage return to the \n, so that '\r\n' is appended to each line, but this does not fix my problem. Could it be a bug?
