UITable in App Designer strips leading white space
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Felix Widmaier
on 10 Feb 2017
Commented: Huzaifa
on 3 Dec 2025 at 10:40
When using uitable in GUIDE, I was able to pad strings with leading spaces to get them right aligned like in the following (using a monospace font):
1532.000
5.543
26.457
Currently I am considering switching to App Designer. I am using the same space-padded strings but here the uitable seems to strip them off. That is the result looks like the following:
1532.000
5.543
26.457
Is there a way to make uitable in App Designer keep the spaces like it did in GUIDE? Or even better, is there a way to directly right-align the strings without the need of padding?
1 Comment
Huzaifa
on 3 Dec 2025 at 10:40
UITable in App Designer automatically trims leading spaces, which makes it difficult to display a blank message or text that begins with indentation. To preserve the visual spacing, you can replace normal spaces with non-breaking spaces (char(160)), since the table does not remove them. By inserting these non-breaking characters at the start of the string, the cell will appear to contain a blank message or properly indented content, while still behaving like standard text inside the UI.
Accepted Answer
More Answers (1)
Greg
on 27 Oct 2021
I encourage the use of proper horizontal-alignment-right as described in Felix's answer. However, in the event somebody has a real need for leading spaces (and apparently also consecutive interior spacing), use the unicode character 160. It is a special character designed to be blank/invisible but not classified as whitespace.
Example code:
text = ["Seafood";char(160+zeros(1,5)) + "Nachos"];
t = uitable(uigridlayout(uifigure,[1,1]),'Data',text);
1 Comment
Usaid
on 4 Aug 2022
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