Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Formatting Strings

Until now, we have simply printed any strings we want to display directly to the browser. PHP provides two functions that allow you first to apply formatting, whether to round doubles to a given number of decimal places, define alignment within a field, or display data according to different number systems. In this section, you learn a few of the formatting options provided by printf() and sprintf().

Working with printf()

If you have any experience with C, you will be familiar with the printf() function. The PHP version is similar but not identical. printf() requires a string argument, known as a format control string. It also accepts additional arguments of different types. The format control string contains instructions ...