Formatting output of a string

I am trying to format output of a String using /t so that when resultset is read into hashmap & printed out then it will be displayed in an email in 2 neatly aligned columns. Problem is that when the field of column one is too big it shoves the whole row across no matter how many /ts I use. Please help this seems such a simple problem but I can find no help.

Have you tried the format methods? They live in PrintStream, String and Formatter, and probably all use Formatter. The PrintStream#printf method is very similar. You can use the width tags to set all the fields to appropriate widths, then you don't need to use \t.
There are full details in the Formatter documentation.

Thanks Campbell,
Im having problems using this formatter class do y ou know of any code examples online that I couild look at I cant see any. Basically trying to populate two columns froma hasmap

Start off with something like

System.out.printf("%20s%25s%n", name, address);

See how that works.
Try the flags shown in the Formatter class. There are a few examples in the Formatter class API, which I think I quoted earlier.

You can set up a Formatter to format to a file (see the Formatter class constructor) and write a similar format with the format method, but beware: as far as I can tell Formatter is only available in overwrite mode, not append mode.

Thanks Campbell