Formatting output to a file? 1.4.2

Question

I am writing an application that writes result sets from an oracle 10g database query. This output combines both text and numeric.
I cannot figure out how to justify the output to the right or left or force the fields to use a set amount of space regardless of the width of the text.
As a result I get an outfile with perfectly lined up columns except for the one or two where instead of a four digit number there is a single number. This change in width shifts all of the output over.
My customer goes nuts over this, surely there is a way to format output?

Answer 1

OK, I tried today, I really did, I just can't get my brain around how to do what I need to accomplish so here is a pseudo example and i am hoping someone can shed some light.
My application is abstract to enable easy addition of instances of automated reports.
I have a 2d array that contains the column names for a given query. [0] = column name, [1] = space to be applied after results are added to a string buffer.
So, something like this:
StringBuffer entireQueryResults = new StringBuffer();
String[][] QueryColumns = someObject.getQueryColumnNames();
ResultSet currResults = someObject.getResultset();
while(currResults.next()){
String currRow = "";
for(int i = 0; i < QueryColumns.length; i++){
   currRow = currRow + currResults.getString(QueryColumns[0])+currResults.getString(QueryColumns[i][1])+"\n";
entireQueryResults.append(currRow);
Now, the problem is that there are columns in the queries that have digits, these can range from a single val to 5 and while 98% of them are 3 digits there are random instances where they are a single digit or even a -1. When this happens it throws the output way off and makes it difficult to read in the resulting email report.
How can I incorporate this into a MessageFormat or ChoiceFormat object to make the output pretty ?