in reply to formated text

I second Taulmarill's suggestion of printf. It's the most common way to create fixed-width text (as opposed to tab-delimited, or what not).

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom