Question

I am writing a program and am stuck in the following requirement:

The output goes to a fixed format file

     Total 1                   Total 2
 ----------------          ----------------
       311,862.33                 23,456.00
        40,000.00                789,123.00  

As in above example, the length of the amount string varies.

Requirement is that the amount should always start at the end of the ‘hyphens’.

How to achieve this ?

I know that right and left pad to the string could be acheived through:

String.format("%1$#20s", "311,862.33");
String.format("%1$-15s", "12345");

But how to achieve in my case where there are multiple strings in every line and the string lengths are dynamic ?

Found below code which formats amount in a single column. But how to achieve the same for multiple columns i.e. multiple amounts in same line ?

String format = "%10.2f\n"; // width == 10 and 2 digits after the dot
float [] floats = {123.45f, 99.0f, 23.2f, 45.0f};
for(int i=0; i<floats.length; i++) {
    float value = floats[i];
    System.out.format(format, value);
}

This will give output as:

123.45
 99.00
 23.20
 45.00

Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

It could be easily done using string format method:

String amount1 = "311,862.33";
String amount2 = "45,678.22";
String content = String.format("%26s", amount1) + String.format("%20s", amount2);

This will give output exactly how I want.