•Re: Can you change the format pad character?

The format directive is pretty frozen and inflexible, although it's always worthy of asking a question because there might be some arcane mechanism to influence it to get your desired behavior. In this case, no. {grin}

However, this piece of code can be dropped in to your program rather easily:

sub pad_string {
  my $string = shift;
  my $desired_length = shift;
  my $pad_character = shift || " ";
  substr($string,0,0) = $pad_character x ($desired_length - length $st
+ring);
  $string;
}
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Comment on •Re: Can you change the format pad character? Download Code

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Re: •Re: Can you change the format pad character? by Not_a_Number (Prior) on May 26, 2003 at 21:28 UTC
At least when the padding is whitespace (which the OP seemed to want), is this solution better than using `(s)printf`? For ex: `my $string = 'foo'; my $len = 15; $string = sprintf "%${len}s", $string; print $string;` [download] Please note: Don't get me wrong. For fear of fire and brimstone, the Novice that I am would not presume to criticise merlyn. It's just that I've been playing with `(s)printf` recently, prompting me to change a few old progs from, like: `print ' ' x ( 23 - length $foo ), $foo;` to: `printf '%23s', $foo;` Have I been I wrong or (more likely), AIMS (Am I Missing Something)? dave	[reply] [d/l] [select]
•Re: Re: •Re: Can you change the format pad character? by merlyn (Sage) on May 27, 2003 at 20:23 UTC
You said: At least when the padding is whitespace (which the OP seemed to want) But OP said: Is it possible to modify the default pad character of the format function from space to something user defined? Yes, had the original question been about padding whitespace, I certainly would have preferred sprintf. But it was precisely not about that, hence my solution. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re: •Re: Re: •Re: Can you change the format pad character? by Not_a_Number (Prior) on Jun 01, 2003 at 17:44 UTC
Doh! How did I manage to read the exact opposite of what was said? Sorry... dave	[reply]


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