Here's another approach that allows ordinary strings, formatted pairs, and formatted pairs with repeat counts to be freely intermixed. Not extensively tested, but seems to work with fair variety of things I've tried, and both with and without file handles. (The prototype is only needed if the function is defined after the point of invocation.) Note: Needs 5.10 for  // operator – easily replaced. 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"sub fmtx (@);
 ;
 print STDERR fmtx
   [ '%3.6f', 1.23, 3 ], '---', [ '%0x', 10 ], [ '%s', 'hi', 4 ],
   qq{that's all, folks \n},
   ;
 ;
 sub fmtx (@) {
   map ref() ? sprintf($_->[0],$_->[1]) x ($_->[2] // 1) : $_, @_
   }
" 2> fmtx_stderr

>cat fmtx_stderr
1.2300001.2300001.230000---ahihihihithat's all, folks

[download]

Update: Original example code did not actually work! Fixed – as far as I can tell. Caveat Programor.

In reply to Re: Printf : How to repeat characters? by AnomalousMonk
in thread Printf : How to repeat characters? by westrock2000

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