Recently I had to use PHP to display a score value such as “3″ padded as “03″. There’s a tiny PHP function that does just this.
1 2 | $myvalue = '3' ; str_pad ((int) $myvalue ,2, '0' ,STR_PAD_LEFT) |
While working with strings, such as $myvalue, I had to convert it to integer using the (int) operator so I can make further calculations with my initial value.
The second parameter is the maximum number of characters to display, so if $myvalue is “10″, it will not be padded.
The third parameter is the character that will be padded, in my case “0″.
The fourth and last parameter is a PHP constant and it’s the position of the padding action, again in my case “left”.
That’s it.
If you wanted to right a function to deal with this, you would write the following:
1 2 3 | function char_padding( $value , $characters , $pad ) { return str_pad ((int) $value , $characters , $pad ,STR_PAD_LEFT); } |
and call it like this:
1 | echo char_padding( $myvalue ,2, '0' ) |
just make sure to have $myvalue already declared.