sprintf

Like many other languages PHP has a sprintf, the reason for this til was that recently I came across two sections at about 18 lines of code, that could be written as single lines using sprintf. So I dug into the PHP documentation to find out whether there was a reason not to.

Zero-padding

<?php
# sprintf.php

$numbers = array("0", "1", "1234", "56789", "123456789", "1234567890");


foreach ($numbers as $number) {
    echo sprintf("PF%'.07d\n", $number);
}

?>

It outputs:

php sprintf.php
PF0000000
PF0000001
PF0001234
PF0056789
PF123456789
PF1234567890

Some notes on the above.

• The constant in sprintf: 7 indicates the maximum number of padding, meaning that the length of the value to be padded can will be padded with zeroes for all of the numbers exceeding it’s length
  • A single 0 becomes 7 zeroes
• If the length of the value exceeds the padding maximum it is just displayed as is and no padding is applied.

Resources and References

• PHP Documentation