Risks of Using Field Width Versus Explicit Delimiters in Tabular Output
Using only field widths to provide for tabulation, as with a format like "%8d%8d%8d" for three integers in three 8-character columns, will not guarantee that field separation will be retained if large numbers occur in the data. Loss of field separation can easily lead to corrupt output. In systems which encourage the use of programs as building blocks in scripts, such corrupt data can often be forwarded into and corrupt further processing, regardless of whether the original programmer expected the output would only be read by human eyes. Such problems can be eliminated by including explicit delimiters, even spaces, in all tabular output formats. Simply changing the dangerous example from before to " %7d %7d %7d" addresses this, formatting identically until numbers become larger, but then explicitly preventing them from becoming merged on output due to the explicitly included spaces. Similar strategies apply to string data.
Read more about this topic: Printf Format String
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