filling blank cell area with spaces

Anon

i would like to know if it possible to take a record from a table and fill the blank area of cell with spaces.

our catalog system can import the order list but the list is read as Cobal ( i think) and each cell is a certain length long. it reads the record as one line and the different cells start and end at different character length numbers. so...

if a mysql table had three cell and each had data in them that was three characters long, we could normally export it as XXX,XXX,XXX

BUT,
the system reads the cells as one long row. so if all the cells are supposed to be 5 characters long i would need to export the file as XXXSPACESPACEXXXSPACESPACEXXXSPACESPACE

does this make sense?

is there any way to do this?

thanks

basim

Are you trying to convert the spaces to commas?

if so, you could use regular expressions to do so.

preg_replace("/\s\s+/" , ",")

maybe that would help as a starting point

Anon

no,

the system reads the feilds starting and ending at certain character length numbers. it does not use commas, tabs or any dilimiters. what i need to do is create a text file that has the feild info starting flush left (for text and flush right and filled with zeros for numbers) , then add spaces to fill the "cell"

what you suggested would look like:
XXX,XXX,XXX

and what i need is (assuming the cell elngths are supposed to be 5 char long and only had 3 char worth of info):
XXXSpaceSpaceXXXSpaceSpaceXXXSpaceSpace

thanks for the info though.

basim

I'm getting confused Bill, you want the end result to be padded with 2 spaces between between each record.

The basic and rudiment way to do this is:
$padding=' ';
$rec[0] ='goo';
$rec[1]='foo';
$rec[2]='bar';

$line = $rec[0] . $padding
$rec[1] . $padding .
$rec[2] . $padding;

I might be off on this

Anon

thanks for the efforts thus far.

i know i may be confusing this or not explaing as well as can be.
here is a better explaination.

there are a number of feilds on a form that need to be loaded into the catalog system.

each field is a certain character length long.
(ex. first name is 10 char long, middle initial is 3 char long and phone number is 15)

when a person fills out this form, if their name is 5 char long, their middle initial is 1 char long and their phone number is 10 digits long, all the info is written on one line to be loaded into the catalog system. the system will read the first 10 characters of the line and know that it is the first name. even though the name was only 5 char long, the ending 5 char need to be filled with "spaces" to bring the middle initial to start at character number 11 and run to char number 13 (because the middle inital length is only 3 char long) and finally the phone number will be 000005551212121

so the info entered will be:
name1, M, 5551212121

and what the system needs to read the info correctly is ( - = a space):
name1-----M--00005551212121

if all the feilds were the same size, i could use a fixed length space filler, but it seems as though i will have to use a count() function and then subtract it from each set length.

does this make more sense?

greg252

Without writing the code, I think this will work. Explode each field by "", count the elements of the resulting array, subtract that number from your max length, and add elements to the end of the array as needed. Implode the whole thing by "" and you have your padded string. Do that for each element and then cat.
Good luck!