Register report alignment question

[yongli-abc]

Hi there, I notice that the Register output is aligning matching account names and amounts at different positions. Is this a alignment issue, or does that actually have any significance?

Couldn't really find anywhere in the documentation about this.

Example

[simonmichael]

Very unusual! Could you try to reduce it to a minimal reproducing example ?

[yongli-abc]

Here's a test.journal

2023-11-10 Crv*giffgaff, London
    liabilities:credit card:barclaycard avios plus          £-8.00
    expenses:housing:utility:phone                           £8.00
2024-01-02 OCTOPUS ENERGY        A-93A7A16B-001	FIRST D
    assets:bank:barclays:current                 £-50.00
    expenses:housing:utility:electricity          £50.00

Here's the report

hledger register acct:utility -f ~/tmp/test.journal
2023-11-10 Crv*giffgaff, London                              expenses:housing:utility:phone                            £8.00         £8.00
2024-01-02 OCTOPUS ENERGY        A-93A7A16B-001 FIRST D       expenses:housing:utility:electricity                     £50.00        £58.0
0

The second account name already has an extra space in front, making it appear like indented.

[simonmichael]

What kind of terminal environment are you running in ? Can you try some others ?

[simonmichael]

@yongli-abc I see the problem: there's a tab character before FIRST D, which confuses the layout algorithm.

I'm not sure if this is a bug.

[simonmichael]

I'm curious how the tab characters came to be there ? Are they part of your bank data ? Was it originally tab-separated values ?

Here are some options for what we can do:

1. allow it, document it
2. reject it as an error. Could be awkward if bank data contains tabs.
3. convert tabs to 1, 2 or 4 spaces when parsing
4. convert tabs to 1, 2 or 4 spaces when rendering text output for register, aregister, maybe print, etc.

[yongli-abc]

Hi, thanks for looking into this. Yes it's part of the journal postings, but I'm not sure how it gets there. I've manually cleared up all the tabs in my journal file, but I think 3 or 4 both make sense!