You can prefix the size requirement with - to left-justify:

sys.stdout.write("%-6s %-50s %-25s\n" % (code, name, industry))

You could try:

"{:>10d}".format(n) where n is an int to pad-left numbers and

"{:>10s}".format(s), where s is a string to pad-left strings

Edit: choosing 10 is arbitrary.. I would suggest first determining the max length.

But I'm not sure this is what you want.. Anyways, this link contains some info on string formatting:

String formatting

You can try this:

def align(word, number):
    return "{:<10s}{:>10d}".format(word, number)

This will pad-right your string with 10 spaces and pad-left your number with 10 spaces, giving the desired result Example:

align('Hello', 3454)
align('nice', 222)
align('bye', 45433)
align('well', 3424)

Try this approach using the newer str.format syntax. This uses a width of 12, space padded, right aligned.

line_new = '{:>12}  {:>12}  {:>12}'.format(words[0], words[1], words[2])

Example with the interpreter:

>>> line = "123 456 789"
>>> words = line.split(' ')
>>> line_new = '{:>12}  {:>12}  {:>12}'.format(words[0], words[1], words[2])
>>> print(line_new)
         123           456           789

And here's how to do it using the old % syntax (useful for older versions of Python that don't support str.format):

line_new = '%12s  %12s  %12s' % (words[0], words[1], words[2])

Your format is easily translated to the str.format() formatting syntax:

print("{:>3s} {:20s} {:>12s}".format("Id", "State", "Population"))
print("{id:3d} {name:20s} {population:12d}".format(**state))

Note that left-alignment is achieved by prefixing the width with <, not -, and default alignment for strings is to left-align, so a > is needed for the header strings and the < can be omitted, but otherwise the formats are closely related.

This extracts the values directly from the state dictionary by using the keys in the format itself.

You may as well just use the actual output result of the first format directly:

print(" Id State                  Population")

Demo:

>>> state = {'id': 15, 'name': 'New York', 'population': 19750000}
>>> print("{:>3s} {:20s} {:>12s}".format("Id", "State", "Population"))
 Id State                  Population
>>> print("{id:3d} {name:20s} {population:12d}".format(**state))
 15 New York                 19750000