Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

A Better print

The print function is a very simple output function; it provides almost no formatting capability. To have fine-grained control over printing such as left and right alignment, decimal precision, and fixed-width output, you can use the Perl printf function. The printf function was borrowed (almost verbatim) from the C programming language, but other languages have a similar function, such as BASIC's print using function. The syntax for printf is as follows:

printf formatstring, list
printf filehandle formatstring, list
					

The formatstring is a string that describes the format of the output, which is described shortly. The list is a list of values that you want printf to display—similar to the print statement. Normally, printf displays ...