Zero-pad digits in string

Question

I need to cast single figures (1 to 9) to (01 to 09). I can think of a way but its big and ugly and cumbersome. I'm sure there must be some concise way. Any Suggestions

Answer 1

There's also str_pad

<?php
$input = "Alien";
echo str_pad($input, 10);                      // produces "Alien     "
echo str_pad($input, 10, "-=", STR_PAD_LEFT);  // produces "-=-=-Alien"
echo str_pad($input, 10, "_", STR_PAD_BOTH);   // produces "__Alien___"
echo str_pad($input, 6 , "___");               // produces "Alien_"
?>

Answer 2

Solution using str_pad:

str_pad($digit,2,'0',STR_PAD_LEFT);

Benchmark on php 5.3

Result str_pad : 0.286863088608

Result sprintf : 0.234171152115

Code:

$start = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<100000;$i++) {
    str_pad(9,2,'0',STR_PAD_LEFT);
    str_pad(15,2,'0',STR_PAD_LEFT);
    str_pad(100,2,'0',STR_PAD_LEFT);
}
$end = microtime(true);
echo "Result str_pad : ",($end-$start),"\n";

$start = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<100000;$i++) {
    sprintf("%02d", 9);
    sprintf("%02d", 15);
    sprintf("%02d", 100);
}
$end = microtime(true);
echo "Result sprintf : ",($end-$start),"\n";

Answer 3

First of all, your description is misleading. Double is a floating point data type. You presumably want to pad your digits with leading zeros in a string. The following code does that:

$s = sprintf('%02d', $digit);

For more information, refer to the documentation of sprintf.