So, I wanted to make the output of my script look a bit nicer, more, you know, friendly. I was working on this thing that spits out a bunch of data, and it was just a wall of text. Not very inviting. I figured there had to be a better way to present this stuff.
I started by just messing around with the basic print statements. I thought, “Okay, maybe if I add some extra spaces and line breaks, it’ll be easier to read.” So, I sprinkled in some n characters here and there to create some separation between different pieces of information.
That was a tiny bit better, but still pretty rough. Then I remembered about using different characters to visually divide sections. Nothing fancy, just some repeated dashes or asterisks. I added a few lines like this:
print("-" 20)- or
print("" 20)
I put those before and after the main chunks of data I was displaying. It helped, creating a little bit of a visual border. It became like separate little boxes, not just endless lines.
Next, I thought about using indentation. Instead of having everything crammed against the left side, I added some spaces at the beginning of certain lines. It’s amazing what a few spaces can do! It made it feel less cluttered, and I could kind of show a hierarchy in the data, if that makes sense. like, this part is related to that part, so it’s indented a bit.
Then I tried adding short descriptions before key * of just displaying a number, I added a little text, for example:
print("Total Count:", my_count)
You know, simple, but it made a big difference. Before, was some mystery number, now at least, anyone can understand.
I also played around with making some parts of the output bold, just by adding around some words, just to highlight the most important bits. The key results, or the labels, got the bold treatment.
The End Result
So, by doing these small changes step by step, the output went from a confusing mess to something that’s actually readable, I was really happy with the result, all thanks to the simple, friendly formatting tricks I had learned. It is much user-friendly, at least I think so. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than it was. I’m still figuring out the best way to organize everything, but it’s a huge improvement. It’s all about those little tweaks!
