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Developers ::
PHP Resources ::
Formatting Output Using
PHP
By Tom Fitzgerald
Ok we learned variables,
now what?
Now we
can learn how to change the output of certain
variables. For example if you have variable
containing the number 3, what if you want to
output it as $3.00, or $0.03 ? How can we do
that easily? There are some other cool things
we can do but as usual; lets actually view the
code and then explain how to do it. There are
two commands we start to use here, printf() and
sprintf().
printf("format",$firstvariable,
$secondvariable);
$variable = sprintf("format", $variable1,
variable2);
printf() outputs formatted
strings and the sprintf() does the same thing
but instead outputs into a variable to be
stored and used for later.
$variable1 = 'Tom';
printf("% says hello",$variable1);
Here we have the printf()
function you will notice the % tells PHP to
output the variable supplied as the second
argument to the function. We could stop there
but printf() has so many more neat functions,
let see. What other things we can add to that
lonely %. The syntax is as follows:
%padding-width.decimaltype
- The padding is a padding
character that we can use to fill in the
blanks so to speak with the value we use is
smaller than the formatting width specified.
(We haven't done that yet). If you don't
specify a padding character, no big deal; a
space is used.
- The - symbol makes the text left
justified, if this is not present it will be
right justified.
- The width is the number
of characters to pad using the padding
character.
- The decimal is the decimal places
to use.
- The type is the type of value, the
command values are s for string or f for float (or numbers with
decimal places)
For example if the padding
character is 0 and the with is 3 and the value
is 5 then output would be.
001
Ok enough of all that, let's see
it in action!
$paycheck = 250;
$newvariable = sprintf("My paycheck is
$%03.2f");
printf($newvariable);
The output would be :
$250.00
The $%03.2f is interpreted as
follows; the % says
to start outputting the variable. The
0 says to pad using
variables. The 3
says to put 3 places
to the left of the decimal point and
the 2 says to go 2 places to the right of
the decimal point.
Other Output
Functions
Let's take a look at some other
output functions, these are really quick simple
examples, starting with Strtoupper().
strtoupper() -
Converting to upper case
$newvariable =
strtoupper($variable);
printf($newvariable);
Takes the $variable and
outputs in all uppercase. You can use
unfirst() to capitalize only the first letter
in the string to uppercase, likewise
ucwords() will upper case each word in the
string to uppercase.
strtr() - Replacing
values
$variable1 = "1 6 3";
$newvariable = strtr($variable1,
"6","2");
printf($newvariable);
This takes $variable1 and reads the
string, replacing 6 with 2, then outputs
1 2 3
substr() - Returns
value inside of string at a specific
point
$newvariable =
substr("tommy", 2,4);
Reads "hello" and returns
everything from the 2nd character to the 4th
character. Outputting:
mmy
substr_count() -
Counts number of times a given item is in a
variable
$variable1 = "tom 123 tom
123 tom 123";
$find = "tom";
$numberoftimesfound =
substr_count($variable1, $find);
In this case the variable
$numberoftimesfound would have
a value of 3 because it found tom 3 times in $variable1.
Using Date Format
Ok now
we did some cool stuff, let's see how simple it
is to use the date since that is used very
heavily in most PHP applications. Like almost
everything else in PHP, accessing the current
date is very easy, let's take a look.
$today = date("d/m/y");
Would give the $today variable a
value of 04/01/2006. Very easy! :)
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