a script i need: column alignment

[Skaperen]

i went ahead and coded my own. i'll post it below so you can red mark it for my bad coding. but it does work on test data and a file with a mix of "tar tvf" listing of different tarballs, prefix with paths to that tarball.

aligncolumns.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""stdin to stdout,align columns, right padded except for numbers."""
from __future__ import print_function
from sys import stdin, stdout

input = stdin
output = stdout

flag = []
wide = []
save = []

for line in input:
    cols = line.rstrip().split()
    save.append(cols)
    if len(flag) < len(cols):
        flag = flag + [0]*(len(cols)-len(flag))
        wide = wide + [0]*(len(cols)-len(wide))
    for x in range(len(cols)):
        wide[x] = max(wide[x],len(cols[x]))
        try:
            float(cols[x])
        except:
            flag[x] = 1
input.close()

for cols in save:
    for x in range(len(cols)):
        pad = ' '*(wide[x]-len(cols[x]))
        if flag[x]:
            cols[x] = cols[x]+pad
        else:
            cols[x] = pad+cols[x]
    print(' '.join(cols),file=output)
output.close()

exit(0)