Formatting Trouble

I got a call from a guy I used to work with. He was producing a new report to email the customers regularly. He knew what he wanted the report to look like. Unfortunately, the actual report was not coming out the way he wanted. He asked me for some pointers.
 
The specific problem was that the text in the report was wrapping to the next line at unexpected locations. I asked him to determine whether the tool he used to view the report was also doing some wrapping of its own. We looked at the report in binary format. We saw some carriage return characters inserted. Also saw a bunch of spaces inserted. Both contributed to his problems.
 
I have done reports using SQL before. It takes some tweaking to get your reports to line up the way you want them to. Sometimes you need to set the width for some columns in SQL*Plus (the report was spooling the output of SQL*Plus executing a SQL script). Other times you need to set some parameters related to wrapping.
 
I don’t work on that project any more. Therefore, I did not go and solve all the problems. I did review and confirm that there were no blatant problems with the SQL For formatting problems such as these, you got to dig in and understand how output is formatted by SQL*Plus. You can’t expect it to look just the way you put_line() the data.