How do I align text output in python?

This should do the trick. I assume there are clever ways.

print '70-78:'.ljust(10) + '*****'

You could also use expandtabs()

print ('70-78'+'\t'+ '*****').expandtabs(10)

Ok, while the solution I'm using is admittedly ad-hoc, it works, and scales better than the answers so far. Basically it's just the method VR17 suggested, but with a little more so that the tab size scales with the data set, and isn't just hard coded in.

First I made a method that returns the number characters in some number.

def charNum(number):
    return math.floor(math.log(number,10)+1)

Then I used the charNum() function on the last point of my lower and upper data sets. Only the last point had to be used on each list because the last point is the biggest number. I then counted the character that weren't numbers(the dash, semicolon, and space), and adjusted accordingly.
So the final tabLength variable looks like this:

tabLength = charNum(lower[-1])+charNum(upper[-1])+3

I then plugged the tabLength variable into the expandTab() function to get proper spacing. Here's some example output:

1-11:  *******
12-22: *
23-33: ***
34-44: **
45-55: ***
56-66: *

99-249:   *****
250-400:  ****
401-551:  **
552-702:  **
703-853:  *
854-1004: ***

99-200079:      ******
200080-400060:  **
400061-600041:  ****
600042-800022:  **
800023-1000003: *

The only problem I can really see with this is that if I wanted to expand this to a table or something the tabs would be all funky. If I did that though, I'd probably look into ljust and rjustwhich I'm not all that familiar with right now. I'll leave the question open for a little while in case someone comes up with a better answer.

lower = [70, 79, 88, 97, 106]
upper = [78, 87, 105, 114, 123]
num = [5, 3, 4, 2, 6, 4]

for l, u, n in zip(lower, upper, num):
    print('{0:<9} {1}'.format('{0}-{1}:'.format(l, u), '*' * n))

http://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#format-specification-mini-language

str.format already has the possibility to specify alignment. You can do that using {0:>5}; this would align parameter 0 to the right for 5 characters. We can then dynamically build a format string using the maximum number of digits necessary to display all numbers equally:

>>> lower = [70, 79, 88, 97, 106, 115]
>>> upper = [78, 87, 96, 105, 114, 123]
>>> num = [5, 3, 4, 2, 6, 4]
>>> digits = len(str(max(lower + upper)))
>>> digits
3
>>> f = '{0:>%d}-{1:>%d}: {2}' % (digits, digits)
>>> f
'{0:>3}-{1:>3}: {2}'
>>> for i in range(len(num)):
        print(f.format(lower[i], upper[i], '*' * num[i]))

 70- 78: *****
 79- 87: ***
 88- 96: ****
 97-105: **
106-114: ******
115-123: ****

Actually, you could even use a single format string here with nested fields:

>>> for i in range(len(num)):
        print('{0:>{numLength}}-{1:>{numLength}}: {2}'.format(lower[i], upper[i], '*' * num[i], numLength=digits))