What are the standard tools to align printed strings in R?

Question

Here is a series of cat statements

words = c("Hello","bar","ROCKnROLL","R","Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious")
for (i in 1:length(words))
{
    cat(paste0(words[i], "\t: ",nchar(words[i]),"\n"))
}

Hello   : 5
bar : 3
ROCKnROLL   : 9
R   : 1
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious  : 34

How would I do to align them like this

Hello                               : 5
bar                                 : 3
ROCKnROLL                           : 9
R                                   : 1
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious  : 34

or like this

                             Hello  : 5
                               bar  : 3
                         ROCKnROLL  : 9
                                 R  : 1
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious  : 34

or eventually like this

             Hello                  : 5
              bar                   : 3
           ROCKnROLL                : 9
               R                    : 1
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious  : 34

Answer 1

Try this:

words = c("Hello","bar","ROCKnROLL","R","Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious")
for (i in 1:length(words)) {
  print(sprintf("%-40s:%d", words[i], nchar(words[i])))
}

with output:

[1] "Hello                                   :5"
[1] "bar                                     :3"
[1] "ROCKnROLL                               :9"
[1] "R                                       :1"
[1] "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious      :34"