How to align text appended to a JScrollPane

I think the screenshot is worth a couple of paragraphs

The best way I can think of doing it is to check for the length of the string an开发者_StackOverflowd depending give/take \t, but it just seems inelegant. Is there a simpler/better way?

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I would use a JTable for this. You can put one in a JScrollPane. This will get you aligned columns automatically. Plus you will get column headers which will aid in understanding what the data means.

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If you want to stick with plain text and have an upper bound on the length of fields (which you'd need to guarantee alignment), then you could use printf.