Writing a string that fills to the left

Hi,

I have data in an array wich I want to output into a text file to match the way another program writies it.

The program seems to write the data with the right most number in a specific column and then fills to the left. So it is like:

Item one: 2.3 15.1 78.1

Item two: 1254.1 678.1 54283.1

I am using and fprintf statment something like:

fprintf(fid,"Item one: %d %d %d,A,B,C)

Using this method, it puts the numbers after a set of spaces and fills to the right, as if you were typing it. The behavour I want is to be able to get it to fill to the left so the rightmost column always lines up.

Is there a way to do that?

Thanks,

Answer 1

[Scott MacKenzie]

You need to include a field width in the format specifier.

An example for integers:

fprintf(fid, 'Item one: %8d %8d %8d', A, B, C);

An example for reals with 1 decimal place:

fprintf(fid, 'Item one: %8.1f %8.1f %8.1f', A, B, C);

Full details are here.

[James Browne]

Great, thankyou!

I can see from that help you can also left justify the field width by using a '-' sign but still have the padding effect that I wanted.