string format

[Charles Hartman]

On Aug 28, 2005, at 5:01 AM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

>>> . . . the particular problem of adding spaces after  a string to  
>>> fill it out to a specified length.
>>
>> It would work if the "incantation" argument of format() would  
>> accept  a variable name, but I can't find a way to make it do  
>> that . . .
>
> You can't do      format("%<myVar>d", otherVar).
>
> But you can do
>  put "%" & myVar & "d" into temp
>  format(temp, otherVar)

I'm not sure you can. This in the message box

     put "string" into s; put "%" & (20 - length(s)) & "d"into tTmp;  
put format(tTmp, s)

produces

    -1879024420

(with a total length of 14), though 'put tTmp' produces '%14' as  
expected. Did I miss something?

Anyway, the solution in this direction that I was thinking of is  
presumably too baroque to be useful -- something like

     put " " into s
     put "%" & 20 - length(s) & "d" into tTailFmt
     put myString & format(tTailFmt, s)

Charles