Re: Using (s)printf()

[Br'er Rabbit]

Having studied the article, I, the newest monk, still can't cipher how to print two floating-point numbers so they'll align On The Decimal, so the numbers may be added properly, pencilularly. e.g., print 0.12345 and -123456.12 to align thusly (oh, please let my spaces be preserved!):

      0.12345
-123456.12

I know I'm not the only monk that seeks this. There is that other fellow in Andalusia.

[RichardK]

Try this

perl -E 'printf("%12.4f\n",12.34)'

gives

>     12.3400

see the docs for sprintf for much more detail :) but in brief it's "%<length>.<dp>f"

[Br'er Rabbit]

Ahhh, but Re-studying the article, the thought arises that the answer might lie with "sprintf()", using it to convert to a string which can be fed to string-processing functions to find the location of the '.' and to identify, and reserve, the parts before and after. Perhaps?

[AnomalousMonk]

Trailing whitespace can be a bit tricky. Maybe something like:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"for my $n (qw(
   0.12345 -0.12345  123456.12 -123456.12  123456.12345 -123456.12345
   )) {
   my ($left, $right) = (7, 5);
   my $s = sprintf qq{%${left}s.%-${right}s}, split m{[.]}xms, $n, 2;
   print qq{'$s'};
   }
"
'      0.12345'
'     -0.12345'
' 123456.12   '
'-123456.12   '
' 123456.12345'
'-123456.12345'