About the text format of DrawText method

[keven]

Dear all,

I am dealing with a text problem. It is that if a want to display a 3*3 ( or other size)
string matrix, for example

string text = "aa b ccc\na bb c\naaa\nbb cc\n"
while using DrawText method, we will get:

aa_b_ccc
a_bb_c
aaa_bb_cc

is there any way that we can get:

aa___b___ccc
a____bb__c
aaa__bb__cc

how to align each column like that?

Thanks

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

keven, not sure I follow - what is the difference exactly in your two examples? Could you please clarify for us?

[keven]

Oh, sorry, my mistake. the system trim the redundant blanks between the strings automatically.
let me use _ to replace blank. now the example looks like:

aa_b_ccc
a_bb_c
aaa_bb_cc

is there any way that we can get:

aa___b___ccc
a____bb__c
aaa__bb__cc

in other words, how to align the string of each column ?


Thanks

[koganam]

Can you not just backpad your strings with spaces to force them to line up?

[keven]

but the thing is I don't know the length of each string.

do we have some method to set the field width of the string ?


Thanks

[Dexter]

You can align values in a string fairly easily using String.Format(),
For example, if you want your values to be left padded every 5 spaces (For a,b,c values) you can do something like this:

String.Format("{0, -5} {1, -5} {2, -5}", a,b,c)

For Right aligned, use 5 instead of -5. This will work fine for any integer that is 5 characters or less, feel free to adjust to your needs as 5 might be too wide. You can use \n in the Format or string 3 of them together, whichever is more readable to you. I believe that should work as you desire with DrawText().

edit: I typod (should be 0, 1, 2 like usual in {}) plus here's a full example!

protected override void OnBarUpdate()
{
    int a = 123;
    int b = 321;
    int c = 12;            
    DrawText("textTag1", String.Format("{0, -5} {1,-5} {2,-5}", a,b,c), 0, Close[0], Color.Red);
    Plot0.Set(Close[0]);
}

[keven]

Oh, it works !

Thanks very much for your help Dexter !