[RESOLVED] string lengths...

stevesweetland

i was wondering if there was a way to tie strlen with substr to ensure a string i pass to a function is always the same length - padding out with spaces if necessary.

eg, if i needed the string 6 characters long

'doggy' becomes 'doggy ' (1 spaces on the end)
'elephant' becomes 'eleph…' (the last character is the horiz. ellipsis)

basically im outputting some database data into <pre> tags, and if i can do this, itd be brilliant, as i could easily line stuff up just using spaces.

yes, there is better things than pre tags, but thats what i have to use, so thats that.

iv had a look, but couldnt come up with anything....

itd just be so damned helpful if there was something easy...

laserlight

Well, do something like:

if (strlen($str) > 6) {
	$str = substr_replace($str, '...', 5);
}

stevesweetland

laserlight wrote:
Well, do something like:
if (strlen($str) > 6) {
	$str = substr_replace($str, '...', 5);
}

i could do that, but id also have to do

$strlen = strlen($str);

if (strlen($strlen) < 6) {
  for ($i = $strlen; $i < 6; $i++){
	$str .= " ";
  };
}

in case the string is less than 6 characters.

what i really want is

$str = makestrlen($str,6);

ill write it as a function, happily - i mean, i have the code up there to do it - as long as there isnt something that already does it.

this might seem just annoying, or pointless, but it would be really handy...

seems a lot of effort to go through, just to be lazy innit...

laserlight

You can just do a:

if (strlen($str) > 6) {
	$str = substr_replace($str, '...', 5);
} else {
	$str = str_pad($str, 6);
}

stevesweetland

fantastic.

i actually started to mess about with extra space strings and substr'ing them based on the length i need + stuff.

in the end, iv done this - thanks for the help - ultra laser!

$string = strlen($string) > $length ? substr_replace($string,"…",($length-1)) : str_pad($string,$length);