How to pad a string to a fixed length with spaces in Python?

python string format
user2977230 picture user2977230 · Dec 1, 2013 · Viewed 97.5k times · Source

I'm sure this is covered in plenty of places, but I don't know the exact name of the action I'm trying to do so I can't really look it up. I've been reading an official Python book for 30 minutes trying to find out how to do this.

Problem: I need to put a string in a certain length "field".

For example, if the name field was 15 characters long, and my name was John, I would get "John" followed by 11 spaces to create the 15 character field.

I need this to work for any string put in for the variable "name".

I know it will likely be some form of formatting, but I can't find the exact way to do this. Help would be appreciated.

Answer

Games Brainiac picture Games Brainiac · Dec 1, 2013

This is super simple with format:

>>> a = "John"
>>> "{:<15}".format(a)
'John           '

Related questions

How can I print literal curly-brace characters in python string and also use .format on it?

x = " \{ Hello \} {0} " print(x.format(42)) gives me : Key Error: Hello\\ I want to print the output: {Hello} 42

Read More
Format timedelta to string

I'm having trouble formatting a datetime.timedelta object. Here's what I'm trying to do: I have a list of objects and one of the members of the class of the object is a timedelta object that shows the duration of …

Read More
Python TypeError: not enough arguments for format string

Here's the output. These are utf-8 strings I believe... some of these can be NoneType but it fails immediately, before ones like that... instr = "'%s', '%s', '%d', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s'" % softname, procversion, …

Read More