Best Practice to Pad Python String up to Specific Length – Python Tutorial

Padding a python string up to a fixed length is a very useful programming tip, which often can simplify the processing of strings in python. In this tutorial, we will introduce how to pad python string.

Preliminaries

#create a string
text = 'this is a test'
#set the string lenth you want
padding_len = 30

There are three kinds of padding style:

String in right

>>> str_right = format(text,'>'+str(padding_len))

The output is:

'                this is a test'

String in left

>>> str_left = format(text,'<'+str(padding_len))
>>> str_left

The output is:

'this is a test                '

String in center

>>> str_center = format(text,'^'+str(padding_len))
>>> str_center

The output is:

'        this is a test        '

You can find from the output, string is padded by blank char, if you want to use other char, you can refer this example.

>>> str_center = format(text,'#^'+str(padding_len))
>>> str_center

The output is:

'########this is a test########'