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

Hello gurus! I'm in the middle of trying to figure out how to pad variable length documents into fixed length documents. I would like to fix the length based on the longest line in the document. Unix used the CAT function but now everything is "win32" Any ideas? thanks

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Re: padding variable length documents
by Caillte (Friar) on May 16, 2001 at 18:43 UTC

    You can pad each line out to a fixed length with sprintf. The following makes a string 70 characters long if <= 70 characters to:

    while(<INPUT>) {
        push @array = sprintf "%70s", $_;
}

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    $japh->{'Caillte'} = $me;

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Re: padding variable length documents
by clintp (Curate) on May 16, 2001 at 18:44 UTC
    If you're asking how to take a file and pad all of the lines out to the same width, this piece might work for you (untested): 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

open(FILE, "+</tmp/foo.txt") || die "Can't open: $!";
$l=0;
@lines=map { chomp;$l=$l<length()?length():$l;$_ } <FILE>;
seek(FILE, 0, 0) || warn "Seek: $!";

for(@lines) {
        printf FILE "%-${l}s\n", $_;
}

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      this is what I have so far but it still doesn't work #!/usr/bin/perl my $maxlength = 80; my $wordlength; my $bufferlength; open(FILE, ">padthis.txt") or die "cant open $!"; while (<>){ chomp; @array = split (" ", $_); foreach $word (@array){ $wordlength = length($word); } $bufferlength = $maxlength - $wordlength; print $bufferlength; #for ($buff = 0; <= $bufferlength; $buff++); for ($i=0;$i<=$bufferlength; $i++) { foreach $word (@array) { print ($word = $word + "*"); print FILE; } } } close FILE;
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Re: padding variable length documents
by AidanLee (Chaplain) on May 16, 2001 at 18:35 UTC
    so what you're asking isn't to make all the documents the same length but to make the lines in a document all the same length? I'm a bit confused, otherwise, what the length of a line has to do with the length of the file it is in.

    update: ps: what would you want to pad the documents with? whitespace?

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