I think i see the problem from readin the other posts. You appear to be printing to a webpage which is not recognizing the consecutive spaces (or, atleast, not displaying them). Just for the sake of sprintf(), i should mention that , if the number before the . in the sprintf() format is positive, the number is right justified, and a negative number to the left of the . left justifies the number. so ...
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; # every job should

my $number = 222.42;

printf("A: \$%10.2f\n",$number);
printf("B: \$%-10.2f\n",$number);

[download]
... would print ... 
%shell > perl test.pl
A: $    222.42
B: $222.42

[download]

If HTML : There are quite a few ways to do it, and i have even been known to use something like the following before printing. But, i am not a CGI programmer, so i am sure there are better ways. 
sub html_space {
    my $Rstring = shift;
    $$Rstring =~ s/ / /g; 
}

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... and a test program ... 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; # every job should

my $number = 222.42;

$number = sprintf("\$%10.2f\n",$number);
&html_space(\$number);
print "A: $number\n";

sub html_space {
    my $Rstring = shift;
    $$Rstring =~ s/ / /g; 
}

[download]
can't sleep clawns will eat me
-- MZSanford

In reply to Re: Can I pad a number with leading spaces rather than leading 0's by MZSanford
in thread Can I pad a number with leading spaces rather than leading 0's by greywolf

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