printf formatting

[littlefluffy]

Hy
I'm new here, same in PHP. I see the thread is very old but my problem is almost as this one.
I have installed PHP 5,MySql 5.5 and Apache 2.2 on Win 7.
My code is run but doesn't execute special characters, except <br>. Even i put \n or \t it is look the same "Hello World".
And when i execute this code

<?php
    $a = 5;
	printf ("%1d<br>", $a);
	printf ("%2d<br>", $a);
	printf ("%3d<br>", $a);
	printf ("%4d<br>", $a);
?>

the output is

5
5
5
5

instead of

5
  5
    5
      5

I will appreciate any help please. I'm kinda stuck, because i just started to understand how output formatting "%m.td" works. Thank you

[littlefluffy]

sorry for wrong display
i will use undescore instead of spaces. So my code supposed to show after execute like this
5
5
5
5

[bradgrafelman]

Welcome to PHPBuilder! When posting PHP code, please use the board's [noparse]

..

[/noparse] bbcode tags as they make your code much easier to read and analyze. Also note that I've moved your posts into their own thread since your issue has nothing to do with the installation (or configuration) of PHP.

As for your issue, note that the output is not what you suggested above. The output is actually going to be:

5<br> 5<br>  5<br>   5<br>

Note that you won't see the increasing spaces because repeated whitespace is ignored by your browser when it renders the HTML source code.

If you want to use padding to increase the space, you'll want to insert a "non-breaking space" such as by using the HTML entity "&nbsp;" rather than a regular space.

[NogDog]

Or you could make use of the <pre> tag, e.g.:

<pre><?php
    $a = 5;
    printf ("%1d\n", $a);
    printf ("%2d\n", $a);
    printf ("%3d\n", $a);
    printf ("%4d\n", $a);
?></pre>

And you could make use of a loop to reduce the amount of duplicated code:

<pre><?php
$a = 5;
foreach(range(1,4) as $nbr) {
    printf ("%".$nbr."d\n", $a);
}
?></pre>

😉

[littlefluffy]

Thank you very much. It works with with <pre> tags. 😃