Printf Question

EchoAngel has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks, say i have an array and this array could contain 2 or 3 elements. first case is element has : apple , oranges. i would go through some foreach loop to access the elements but I want to print it to the screen like

Missing 1 element , current list :     apple     oranges
[download]

i want to display those elements with specific spacing like the printf statement but i dont' know how u do that with appending to other text.

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Re: Printf Question by tachyon (Chancellor) on Aug 31, 2004 at 14:30 UTC
`my @print_elements = map{ sprintf "%20s", $_ } @elements; my $missing = $WANTED - @elements; if ( $missing > 0 ) { print "Missing $missing element(s), current list: @print_elements\ +n"; } else { # blah }` [download] cheers tachyon	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Printf Question by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 31, 2004 at 15:34 UTC
You want spacing like printf without the line break? Just omit the "\n". `if (...some are missing...) { printf("Missing %d element , current list : ", $missing_count); printf("%-9s", $_) foreach (@list); print("\n"); }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Printf Question by revdiablo (Prior) on Aug 31, 2004 at 18:16 UTC
Another approach would be to dynamically generate a template for printf. Here's an example: `my @missing = qw(apple oranges); my $template = "Missing %d element , current list :" . ("%9s") x @missing . "\n"; printf $template, scalar @missing, @missing;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Printf Question by ccn (Vicar) on Aug 31, 2004 at 14:21 UTC
perlform	[reply]
Re: Printf Question by pelagic (Priest) on Aug 31, 2004 at 14:29 UTC
Maybe it's that simple: `use strict; my @fruit = qw/apple oranges/; print '<', join (' ', @fruit), '>'; ___OUTPUT___ <apple oranges>` [download] pelagic	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Printf Question by qumsieh (Scribe) on Aug 31, 2004 at 18:51 UTC
i dont' know how u do that with appending to other text. In addition to what the others said, you can use `sprintf()` which returns a formatted string which you can append to a variable.	[reply] [d/l]