string format

[Marielle Lange]

Alex,

> The format function is indeed very useful - but I don't think it  
> can be used to solve the particular problem of adding spaces after  
> a string to fill it out to a specified length.
>
> Or at least - when I was looking at the problem the other day, one  
> of the alternatives I considered was "format", but I couldn't see a  
> way to use it to solve this problem :-)

I had forgotten the spaces were to be put after the string, rather  
than before. I reckon the example you provided was really making  
excellent used of xTalk (nice lesson, thanks).

What you can do with sprintf (sorry, format in xtalk) combined with  
regular expressions is quite powerful though:

put format("%14s","A") into aDataCell
get matchtext(aDataCell, "( *)(.*)", tspaces, tstr)
put "_" & tstr & tspaces & "_"
("_" only added to make the trailing spaces visible)

Marielle
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
---------------------------------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguistics, Lecturer in Psychology and  
Informatics
University of Edinburgh, UK

Homepage:  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/
Lexicall project: http://lexicall.org
Revolution-education project: http://revolution.lexicall.org