Right justify amounts in hledger journal text file

Question

I have a text file and I'm trying to right-align / justify the amounts (123.00 EUR) to a specified column number (say 53) by stretching the spaces before them appropriately

# 2018

; A comment



* Transactions

2018-01-01 @Payee | Internet
    expenses:communication:internet      123.00 EUR
    assets:cash:eur

2018-01-01 @Landlady | Rent
    expenses:housing:rent      321.00 EUR
    expenses:fees                2.50 EUR  ; Bank fee
    assets:bank:eur

The output should be

# 2018

; A comment



* Transactions

2018-01-01 @Payee | Internet
    expenses:communication:internet       123.00 EUR
    assets:cash:eur

2018-01-01 @Landlord | Rent
    expenses:housing:rent                 321.00 EUR
    expenses:fees                           2.50 EUR  ; Bank fee
    assets:bank:eur

It could probably be done with awk or printf or something but I can't figure it out.

More about the issue in the narrow sense as applied to hledger at Add option to print with normalized output width · Issue #1045 · simonmichael/hledger

Answer 1

Using GNU awk for the 3rd arg to match:

$ cat tst.awk
match($0,/^([[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+)[[:space:]]+([0-9.]+ [[:upper:]]+)(.*)/,a) {
    $0 = sprintf("%-39s %13s%s", a[1], a[2], a[3])
}
{ print }

$ awk -f tst.awk file
# 2018

; A comment



* Transactions

2018-01-01 @Payee | Internet
    expenses:communication:internet        123.00 EUR
    assets:cash:eur

2018-01-01 @Landlady | Rent
    expenses:housing:rent                  321.00 EUR
    expenses:fees                            2.50 EUR  ; Bank fee
    assets:bank:eur

I'm using %-39s %13s instead of %-40s%13s above to ensure you get a space between the 2 fields even if the first field ended up being longer than 40 characters.