How do I get the rightmost column to fill the remaining space?

Say I have a table with only three small columns. It looks untidy and unbalanced to have a narrow, tall table hugging the left side of my screen (example), so I'd like the table to cover the width of the page. However, when I set the table width to 100%, all the columns are stretched out as well, so now my data is spread thinly across the screen, which also looks untidy (example).

What I'm looking for is a solution where all the columns have the same size as they would have had if the table was width: auto, but the final column fills the remaining space on the screen. This is what Spotify does, for example:

The "User" column will cover the remaining width, no matter what. Is there a relatively simple way of achieving this with HTML tables and CSS?

Solution 1:

I have found a simple solution:

table td:last-child {
    width: 100%;
}

Result:

body {
    font: 12px "Sans serif";
}

table {
    width: 100%;

    background-color: #222222;
    color: white;
    border-collapse: collapse;
}

table th {
    padding: 10px;
    text-align: left;
}

table td {
    padding: 2px 10px;
}

table td:last-child {
    width: 100%;
}

table td:nth-child(odd), table th:nth-child(odd) {
    background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.05);
}

table tr:nth-child(even) {
    background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.05);
}

table tr:last-child td {
    padding-bottom: 10px;
}

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Product</th>
        <th>Cardinality</th>
        <th>Price per item</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Apple</td>
        <td>5</td>
        <td>$2</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Pear</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>$3</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Sausage</td>
        <td>10</td>
        <td>$0.5</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Pineapple</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>$8</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Tomato</td>
        <td>5</td>
        <td>$1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Lightsaber</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>$99 999</td>
    </tr>
</table>

This appears to work in my current scenario, but it looks like something that can cause unwanted side effects in other situations. If I stumble across any, I'll edit this answer.

Possible side effects

• Multi-word table cells will be wrapped into multiple lines to keep the column as narrow as possible. One solution is to use white-space: nowrap on the table cells, but that will hinder cells with lots of text from wrapping when they should.

Solution 2:

If this is what you meant:

Then I can achieve that using standard html table structure with the following css:

table {
  width:auto;
}
td {
  white-space:nowrap;
}
td:last-child {
  width:100%;
}

--EDIT : work with your jsfiddle