I think i see the problem from readin the other posts. You appear to be printing to a webpage which is not recognizing the consecutive spaces (or, atleast, not displaying them). Just for the sake of sprintf(), i should mention that , if the number before the . in the sprintf() format is positive, the number is right justified, and a negative number to the left of the . left justifies the number. so ...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; # every job should

my $number = 222.42;

printf("A: \$%10.2f\n",$number);
printf("B: \$%-10.2f\n",$number);
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... would print ...

%shell > perl test.pl
A: $    222.42
B: $222.42
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If HTML : There are quite a few ways to do it, and i have even been known to use something like the following before printing. But, i am not a CGI programmer, so i am sure there are better ways.

sub html_space {
    my $Rstring = shift;
    $$Rstring =~ s/ / /g; 
}
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... and a test program ...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; # every job should

my $number = 222.42;

$number = sprintf("\$%10.2f\n",$number);
&html_space(\$number);
print "A: $number\n";

sub html_space {
    my $Rstring = shift;
    $$Rstring =~ s/ / /g; 
}
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---

_{can't sleep clawns will eat me}
-- MZSanford