I want to change the amount of spaces before a word

Question

I am trying to have a user input a word and a certain number of spaces before it: e.g. if the user wants 10 spaces before a word it will print:

..........foo

But without the .'s (That's just to make it clear that there is ten spaces here!). How would I go about doing this?

checkout [How can I fill out a Python string with spaces?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5676646/how-can-i-fill-out-a-python-string-with-spaces) — chickity china chinese chicken, Dec 21 '16 at 19:59
How about `10 * " " + "foo"`... Or more generally: `n_spaces * " " + ` — blacksite, Dec 21 '16 at 20:03
@JimFasarakisHilliard: Dupe question is related to filling up the spaces for constant width of OVERALL string. But here OP want the count of space as constant — Moinuddin Quadri, Dec 21 '16 at 20:38

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 21 '16 at 20:04

3

You may use str.format as:

>>> space_count = 10
>>> '{}{}'.format(' '*space_count, 'Hello')
'          Hello'
#^^^^^^^^^^
#1234567890 spaces

answered Dec 21 '16 at 20:04

Moinuddin Quadri

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 21 '16 at 20:04

1

As I alluded to in the comments, you can define a function to add any number of spaces to the left of your string:

def add_spaces(n_spaces, string):
    return " " * n_spaces + string

Test it out:

>>> add_spaces(10, "foo")
'          foo'

answered Dec 21 '16 at 20:04

blacksite

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 21 '16 at 20:17

0

Let's say your string is x="foo", and you have pad=10 indicating the number of spaces you want to pad to the left.

Then you can use "format" method for strings in Python in the following way:

("{:>%d}" %(len(x)+pad)).format(x)

It is basically the same as "{:>13}".format(x), indicating you want to right align x within a total length of 13 by padding spaces between x.

edited Dec 21 '16 at 20:17

Will

answered Dec 21 '16 at 20:11

DiveIntoML

3 Answers3