Printing a specified number of characters

[Becky]

Is there a way of printing a specified number of characters? For example if I want to print 14 spaces followed by an 'A' ?

Extending this, could I do something like:

<code> $number = 5;
$number_two = 7;

print "$number(spaces) A $number_two(spaces) B \n";

[kvale]

A simple way of doing this is to use the  x repetition operator:

print ' ' x $number, 'A', ' ' x $number_two, "B\n";

-Mark

[tjh]

Also, while this isn't a direct print as others have described, more information can be found in perlfaq4 about string padding here using sprintf. (Puts your reformatted string in a variable for later use.)

Good, easy access to all Perl docs and FAQ's can be found here, and excellent tutorials from experienced monks are here on Perl Monks.

HTH

[Nightblade]

you can do like this:  print " "x14 . "A";

$number = 5;
$number_two = 7;
print ' 'x$number . "A" . ' 'x$number_two."B\n";

[grinder]

Apart from x, the repetition operator, you might also want to consider using printf/sprintf. The only problem is that your number also has to include the width of the character you want to print (i.e. the overall field width). This may or may not be a problem, depending on how you create the values of $number and $number_two. Anyway, the code to do it looks like:

  printf "%${number}s %${number_two}s\n", 'A', 'B';

The variable name needs to be enclosed in curly braces to stop the interpreter from looking for the variables named $numbers and $number_twos. The idea is that %20s will print a value in a right-justified field of length 20. Rather than hard-coding the 20, we pick it up from a variable.


print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'