Question

I am writing data in a file. The file will look like this.

[section1] [section2] [section3]
[section1] [section2] [section3]

I am not writing data to the file directly.
I am first appending rows in a string and then writing to a file.

$str .= "section1_data  section2_data   section3_data\n";
$str .= "section1_more_data   section2_more_data   section3_more_data\n";

Now what I want is that all the sections should be 30 chars long.
The data inside all sections will always be less than or equal to 30 chars.

Is there a way to do this in perl?

I am using following syntax to write to file

open FH,">>filename";
print FH $str;
close FH;

Answer 1

$str .= sprintf("[%-30s] [%-30s] [%-30s]\n",
    $section1_data,
    $section2_data,
    $section3_data,
);