Javascript: quick script to line up pipe-delimited text (or any-character-delimited text)

Question

Background: I've written this before but I don't like the approach. The reason is because Javascript does not have "sprintf" and that is something I use heavily if the language supports it.

Question: How would you use javascript to go from BEFORE to AFTER? If anyone has a solution with very small number of lines of code, or something from a javascript string library, that would be informative. TIA.

BEFORE:

red| lightblue| green 
cherry| ice| mint 
round| cubic| flowery

AFTER:

red    | lightblue | green 
cherry | ice       | mint 
round  | cubic     | flowery

Disclaimer: This is not homework or any such thing, just looking for new ideas. Also, this is not browser-based javascript. This is not a web-development question, but a javascript programming question.

Answer 1

function pad(str, len) {
    for (var count = len - str.length; count > 0; count--) {
        str = str + " ";
    }
    return str;
}

console.log(pad("red", 7) + "| " + pad("lightblue", 9) + "| " + pad("green", 7));
//etc.

Yeah, concatenating characters one by one is inefficient, but generally you'll only have a small number of iterations.

Answer 2

If you like sprintf, why not look for a JavaScript implementation for it?