function [s, maxVarLen, colWidth] = alignTabularContents(s, colWidth)

% When the variables in a table are strings or chars, there is a

% possibility for them to be misaligned. For instance, strings

% containing hyperlinks will show up on the command window as

% possibly a different character width than what strlength()

% returns. Same for <strong> text. International characters also

% pose this problem, since the widths of Unicode characters cannot

% be guaranteed to be the same, usually causing strings containing

% international characters to be wider than ASCII text with the

% same number of characters.

% The purpose of alignTabularContents is to check for these

% potential cases of misalignment and adjust the strings properly

% so they are as close to even as possible. wrappedLength() is used

% to accurately obtain the display width of each line of text. For

% the case of international characters, it is impossible to line

% them up exactly due to them being non-integral character lengths.

% Thus, the remainder is tracked to ensure they are aligned within

% 1 character of other ASCII lines.

% alignTabularContents is used to align table variables that are

% nx1 strings or multi-column table variables to ensure that each

% sub-column of a table variable is aligned properly, before that

% variable is aligned with other variables in the table.

if nargin < 2 

    [rows, cols] = size(s);

    colWidth = zeros(rows,1);

else 

    %rows = size(s,1);

    cols = 1; 

end 

tagged = containsRegexp(s,'<a\s+href\s*=|<strong>'); 

varLengthM = strlength(s); 

for idx = 1:numel(s) 

    tagged(idx) = tagged(idx) || any(s{idx} > char(128)); 

end 

varLengthM(tagged) = vectorizedWrappedLength(s(tagged)); 

for c=1:cols 

    varLength = varLengthM(:,c); 

    maxVarLen = max(ceil(varLength)); 

    postPadLen = maxVarLen - varLength; 

    colWidth = colWidth + (postPadLen - floor(postPadLen)); 

    tooLong = colWidth > 1; 

    colWidth(tooLong) = colWidth(tooLong) - 1; 

    postPadLen(tooLong) = postPadLen(tooLong) +1; 

    ppI = floor(postPadLen); 

    for r = 1:max(ppI) 

        % add the spaces in place to improve performance

        s(ppI >= r,c) = s(ppI >= r,c) + " "; 

    end 

end 

end