Question

How do you format a number as a string so that it takes a number of spaces in front of it? I want the shorter number 5 to have enough spaces in front of it so that the spaces plus the 5 have the same length as 52500. The procedure below works, but is there a built in way to do this?

a = str(52500) b = str(5) lengthDiff = len(a) - len(b) formatted = '%s/%s' % (' '*lengthDiff + b, a) # formatted looks like:'     5/52500' 

Answer 1

Format operator:

>>> '%10d' % 5 '         5' >>>  

Using * spec, the field length can be an argument:

>>> '%*d' % (10,5) '         5' >>>