SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

A Better Way to print

The print function is a very simple output function; it provides almost no formatting capability. To have fine-grained control over the appearance of expression values, such as left and right alignment, number of digits of decimal precision, and fixed-width output, you must use the Perl printf function instead.

Formatted Printing with printf

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 ...