I would normally do what matija & kvale suggest. I've also seen code that appends $field_size zeros to the print string, and then taking a substring:

$padding ="0" x $field_size;
$padded_string = substring $text . $padding, 0, $field_size;

[download]

If you have a humonguous number of fields to output, it might be worth benchmarking the two methods.

--
TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA

In reply to Re: sprintf question by TomDLux
in thread sprintf to zero-pad on the right by Anonymous Monk

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