Perl: Formatting String

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

In Perl, if you want to print arrays or hashes for later reading into Perl program, you'll need to use “Data::Dumper” module.

#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# perl

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 0;  # set it to print in a compact way

@ss = (3, 4, 5);
%ss = qw(mary 17 joe 18 alice 19);
# qw for autoquote, same as ('mary' => 17, 'joe' => 18, 'alice' => 19)

print Dumper(\@ss), "\n";   # $VAR1 = [3,4,5];
print Dumper(\%ss), "\n";   # $VAR1 = {'joe' => 18,'alice' => 19,'mary' => 17};

For formatting strings, you can use “sprintf”, which is like other language's “format”.

Or, you can use “printf”, which is equivalent to print sprintf(FORMAT, LIST).

#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# perl

# integer
printf '%d', 1234;  # 「1234」
print "\n";

# padding by space
printf '%4d', 12;   # 「  12」
print "\n";

# float. 2 integer, 4 decimal
printf '%2.4f', 3.123456789;  # 「3.1235」
print "\n";

# string.
printf '%5s', 'cats';  # 「 cats」
print "\n";
printf '%2s', 'cats';  # 「cats」
print "\n";

printf ('%2d◇%6d◇%2.4f◇%s', 1234, 5678, 3.1415926, 'cats');
# prints 「1234◇  5678◇3.1416◇cats」

Perl String