Is There A Better Way?

The_Shadow has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Currently I have this piece of code:

use strict; 
use warnings; 
my $input; 
my $length; 
print "Enter ID Number: "; 
$input = <STDIN>; 
chomp($input); 
do { 
$input = "0" . $input; 
$length = length($input); 
} until $length eq "11";
[download]

The whole point of this is the make $input 11 characters long so it can be compared with another variable read from a file. What I would like to know is is there a better way to do this?

edited: Tue Aug 13 15:05:35 2002 by jeffa - added code tags, removed unnecessary br tags

Comment on Is There A Better Way? Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Is There A Better Way? by Shendal (Hermit) on Aug 13, 2002 at 15:12 UTC
What you're looking for is sprintf. For example: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; print "Enter ID Number: "; chomp(my $input = <STDIN>); die "Not a number!" if ($input =~ /\D/); $input = sprintf("%011d",$input); print "input: $input\n";` [download] Cheers, Shendal	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Is There A Better Way? by simeon2000 (Monk) on Aug 13, 2002 at 15:12 UTC
sprintf is great for formatting numbers. `$input = sprintf("%011d", $input);` That oughtta do the trick. -- `perl -e "print qq/just another perl hacker who doesn't grok japh\n/"` simeon2000\|http://holdren.net/	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Is There A Better Way? by simeon2000 (Monk) on Aug 13, 2002 at 15:47 UTC
And since there's more than one way to do it... `$num = 12; print 0 x (11 - length($num)), $num;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Is There A Better Way? by rob_au (Abbot) on Aug 14, 2002 at 02:01 UTC
And some more obfuscated ways listed in this thread - Including my own attempt at obscurity ... `sub a{$_=int$_[0]10*$_[1]+.5;s;(.{$_[1]})$;\.$1;;chop if substr($_,- +1)eq'.';return$_};` [download] ... Although I would not use it in production code myself :-)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Is There A Better Way? by tjh (Curate) on Aug 13, 2002 at 18:44 UTC
There are also other answers in this recent thread on essentially the same question.	[reply]
Re: Is There A Better Way? by The_Shadow (Novice) on Aug 13, 2002 at 20:07 UTC
Thanks all. The sprintf function did it.	[reply]


Problems? Is your data what you think it is?
	PerlMonks