How do I align the text in a print statement

I assume you mean wrap, not align. It depends on where you want the wrapping to happen:

• Just visually, in the editor? Try turning on "line wrap"/"word wrap" (don't have a copy of Padre handy here so I can't tell you exactly which menu it's under)

• In the source file? There are several techniques, the simplest is probably using the . (dot) concatenation operator:

  print "How do I align this statement so "
       ."that it does not look like a run on "
       ."sentence and take up the whole screen? \n";
  [download]

  There are also modules to help you with formatting your Perl source, in particular perltidy, although that won't break up long strings like that for you.

• On output? Store the text in a variable and then use a module like the core module Text::Wrap (I see 1nickt has already pointed this out).

See the core module Text::Wrap.

If you're talking about output, maybe consider using a heredoc. That's described in "perldoc: Quote-Like Operators". Here's an example:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

print <<'EOT';
How do I align this statement so that it
does not look like a run on sentence
and take up the whole screen?
EOT
[download]

Output:

How do I align this statement so that it
does not look like a run on sentence
and take up the whole screen?
[download]

You may also find formatted printing, with printf, useful. See the sprintf documentation for the formatting codes (and a huge number of examples).