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.

$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:

function char_padding($value,$characters,$pad) {
return str_pad((int) $value,$characters,$pad,STR_PAD_LEFT);
}

and call it like this:

echo char_padding($myvalue,2,'0')

just make sure to have $myvalue already declared.

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