Now, before you set this on up to get reaped, I wasnt sure where golf-type stuff should go. /me wonders to this day. Anyway:

While coding away, I realized I needed to make strings fit pre-determined column lengths. So I decided to whip up a subroutine to take in the length, and a ref to the string.

I thought I had seen a discussion in a book somewhere about using ###'s to help format the columns in a flat file, but couldnt find it again. *sigh*

So I came up with this:
print FILE format_text(length => 10,string => \$string);

########################
## format_text
########################
sub format_text {
        my %args = (@_);

        ${$args{string}} = substr(${$args{string}},0, $args{length});

        return "${$args{string}}" . ' 'x($args{length} -length(${$args
+{string}}));
}

[download]
So there we have it. Not to shabby, if I dont say so myself. I'm still learning, and enjoying every day of it, so the way I figure it, yay. Alas, I am curious as to weither or not there is a glarningly obvious way to do this that I've overlooked.

So, can I do it quicker? In shorter code? Any thoughts?

_14k4 - webmaster@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)

In reply to (golf)String Concats or: playing with substr() by one4k4

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