using tabulation in Python logging format

Have you tried entering a literal tab character in the config file instead of \t? This works for me.

Sorry for coming late to the party, but the info could be useful for others also ...

I also wanted a tabulated looking log, especially the "levelname" field

my format was looking like this

format = %(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(name)s - %(message)s  

which made my logs look something like this

2014-10-01 17:42:54,261 - INFO - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:43:09,700 - DEBUG - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:02,994 - WARNING - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:31,686 - CRTITICAL - internal.....

my solution was to change the format like this

format = %(asctime)s - %(levelname)-8s - %(name)s - %(message)s  

which turned my logs in something like this

2014-10-01 17:42:54,261 - INFO     - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:43:09,700 - DEBUG    - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:02,994 - WARNING  - internal.....
2014-10-01 17:44:31,686 - CRITICAL - internal.....

The "8" is the length of the longest string that is expected there, in this case, "CRITICAL". The "-" tells to right-pad the string

side-note: doing

print "-%3s-" % "abcd"

will output

-abcd-

... the string doesn't get truncated