padding a string with blanks

[Claus Mygind]

How do I add blanks to a string?

I want to evaluate the length of a number (number of digits) and pad the string with blanks depending on the length

The number can be 1 to 6 digits.

1) get the length of the number
2) pad the string with the number of blanks where 6 - string length = number blanks to pad.
For example
123 = "123bbb"
1234 = "1234bb"
12345 = "12345b"
123456 = "123456"

Using the sample code from the online php manual as shown below, I don't get the result they show.

$job = 12345;
echo 'start-';
echo printf("[%-10s]\n", $job); // left-justification with spaces
echo '-end';

This code gives me:
start-[12345 ] 13-end

Not sure why it prints the 13. And I don't see 10 blanks in the result either.

[Claus Mygind]

I see I made the mistake of adding echo to the response which gave me the 13.

But I want to do further massaging of the string, so I just want to capture the string ie: "1234bb" in a variable not actually streaming it out. So I guess I should not be using "sprintf"

[Claus Mygind]

I guess the following code is correct, I hope

<?php
$job = 12345;
echo 'start-';
$padLen = str_pad($job, 6);
echo $padLen;
echo '-end';
echo strlen($padLen)."<br>";
echo 'start-';
$padLen = str_pad($job, 10);
echo $padLen;
echo '-end';
echo strlen($padLen)."<br>";

[Dormilich]

you might also find sprintf() feasible (look at example #7).

But I want to do further massaging of the string, so I just want to capture the string ie: "1234bb" in a variable not actually streaming it out. So I guess I should not be using "sprintf"

but that’s what sprintf() is doing, it returns a string (into a variable). printf() echoes the string out.

[Claus Mygind]

Yeah! that one is a little harder for me to wrap my brain around. Example 7 was the one I used in my sample code. The str_pad() was just a little easier to understand and to incorporate into my code, where I want to create a string something like this "123bbbsome text".
(in this example b = space)

This can easily be coded as
$myString = str_pad($numVar , 6).$alphaVar;

Not sure how I would write that with sprintf()?