PHP: Fixed length ? How ?

Junior WebHelper Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 20

How to get this output from

$string = "Test"

print $string

output will be
" Test"

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 5:10 pm (21 years, 2 months ago)

I'm not sure I understand your question. what are you trying to do exactly?

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 5:19 pm (21 years, 2 months ago)

add a leading space by the look of it...

Junior WebHelper Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 20

Yes a Fixed Wide String

From this string

Code:

"Test"

to this

Code:

" Test"

8 character string

thank you
hope you understand

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Do you want to always add the same white space, or always add enough white space to make it 8 characters?

Maybe you could use strlen to find out the length, and then add whatever number of spaces you need to add to make up the correct number of chars.

Junior WebHelper Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 20

yes i have that idea just wonder if there is any shorter script

another idea is

Code:

$string = "test". " ";
$string = substr($string,0,8);

WebHelper Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 69 Location: Texas

How 'bout a line line answer? Assume $foo contains your string, and you want it to be left padded with spaces to a size of 8.

Code:

$foo = sprintf("%8s", $foo);

If $foo = "ABC" then the results of this will be " ABC". Short and sweet. Smile

WebHelper Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 69 Location: Texas

tyjtyj wrote:

another idea is

Code:

$string = "test". " ";
$string = substr($string,0,8);

That's backwards from what you said you wanted. That will put spaces on the right, not on the left. If you want to go this route, rather than the other solution I suggested, you should do this:

Code:

$foo = substr(" " . $foo, -8)

This assumes that your input string is never longer than 8 characters. The string of blanks is exactly 8 spaces long, and the substr() function starts at the right side of the string (because of the negative start position) to the end of the string.

As is usual with perl, there is more than one way to do it. Very Happy