To the best of my knowledge, printf (and sprintf) will never truncate a field that is too long for the width specified in the format string
s?printf does what you tell it  printf "%1.1s$/", 'foy'; yields 'f',  printf "%s$/", 'foy'; yields 'foy'. As for Limbic~Regions note, you can't convert variable width "records" to fixed width ones without possibly undergoing some truncation ;)

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In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Converting CSV files to fixed width flat files by PodMaster
in thread Converting CSV files to fixed width flat files by jkinchlow

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