Hello everyone,

I frequently want to display query results in SQL*Plus,
but they come out poorly formatted because
the default length of the columns causes excessive wrapping on lines.

I can fix the problem to some extent by:
set linesize 130
set pagesize 80

and then I can *manually* issue a bunch of format comands like:

column <columnName> format a40


What I would like to be able to do is run a script that
would take a table name as its input and it would detect the
columns and datatypes of the table and issue the column
format commands.

I initially thought I could do this with PL/SQL as follows:

Define a cursor:
CURSOR myCur IS SELECT column_name, data_type
FROM Cols
WHERE table_name = UPPER( tableName );

and then loop through the result set, get the data type of each column,
and then kick off the appropriate column format command. Unfortunately,
it seems that one can't issue SQL*Plus commands from a PL/SQL script.

So... I can try to do all the processing from SQL*Plus, but then I
don't know how to capture the output from a SQL statement and
loop through it to issue the column format commands...

any ideas?

thanks,
Jeff