I was fooling around with Benchmark a bit earlier, and I found that substr seems to be slightly(not much, but slightly) faster than sprintf for creating zero-padded numbers. So my question is this... Why use sprintf? Is there any reason other than ease of use?

Please note that this question ONLY applies to creating zero-padded numbers, I understand why you would need to use sprintf for other purposes.

Benchmark code below: 

use Benchmark;

timethese(1000000, { 'Method one' => '&one', 'Method two' => '&two' } 
+);

sub one {
    my $number = "213";
    my $padded = sprintf("%09d",$number);
    #print $padded,"\n"; 
    # the above line is only uncommented when
    # benchmarking with 1 loop to test to make
    # sure resulting number is what we want
}

sub two {
    my $number = "213";
    my $padded = "000000000";
    my $length = length($number);
    substr($padded,(-$length),$length,$number);
    #print $padded,"\n";
}

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In reply to sprintf vs. substr (for zero-padded values) by Theseus

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