Question

I have two strings I want to combine and have not exceed a certain width.

$string = sprintf("%4(%s %s)", $s1, $s2);
//s1 s

Notice how the combined %s %s did not exceed a width of 4.

How can I do this with sprintf?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You probably need to add more detail to your question – what do you want to happen if the fields are longer than 3 characters (4 – one space)?

But maybe this is what you want:

sprintf("%.4s", "$s1 $s2");

That will output the combined string "$s1 $s2", pruned to 4 characters. Of course substr would do the same, this might be useful in the context of a longer format string.

To be honest I hadn’t realised before that the precision specifier (. followed by number) could be used with %s.