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

In the hope that this doesn't force a reevaluation of the old maxim "there's no such thing as a stupid question.", I'd like to find out what command to use to create a variable length scalar like this (eg, supposing there was a command CharString), it would return

CharString('*', 3) = '***'
CharString(' ', 5) = '     '       # ie 5 spaces
CharString('y', 0) = ''

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Re: Building strings of specific length
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 14, 2009 at 17:27 UTC
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Re: Building strings of specific length
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 14, 2009 at 17:36 UTC

    Trying to guess at the bigger picture, you might also be interested in sprintf 

    printf("[%5d]\n", 123);   # Prints [  123]

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    and Perl6::Form (it brings Perl 6's forms to Perl 5). 

    use Perl6::Form;

print form
    " =================================== ",
    "| NAME     |    AGE     | ID NUMBER |",
    "|----------+------------+-----------|",
    "| {<<<<<<} | {||||||||} | {>>>>>>>} |",
       $name,     $age,        $ID,
    "|===================================|",
    "| COMMENTS                          |",
    "|-----------------------------------|",
    "| {[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[} |",
       $comments,
    " =================================== ";

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Re: Building strings of specific length
by zwon (Abbot) on Oct 14, 2009 at 17:27 UTC
    print '*' x 3, "\n", ' ' x 5, "=\n", 'y' x 0, "=\n";
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      Perfect. ++.
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