5.5. Formatted Output with printf

You may wish to have a little more control with your output than print provides. In fact, you may be accustomed to the formatted output of C's printf function. Fear not—Perl provides a comparable operation with the same name.

The printf operator takes a format string followed by a list of things to print. The format^[*] string is a fill-in-the-blanks template showing the desired form of the output:

^[*] Here, we're using "format" in the generic sense. Perl has a report-generating feature called "formats" that we won't even be mentioning (except in this footnote) until Appendix B, and then only to say that we really aren't going to talk about them. So, you're on your own there. Just wanted to keep you from getting lost.