Do you even sprintf?

“Do you even lift, bro?!” What a way to ask if you work out while simultaneously insulting you. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have named this “do you even sprintf” but it really surprises me how many PHP devs forget about (or don’t even know about) this useful tool - and instead do some pretty icky looking string concatenation. Let’s take a look at what sprintf() can do for us.

If you’re curious, you can check out a bunch about the history of printf formatting. PHP provides a number of functions in this family: printf(), sprintf() and vsprintf(). For this entry, I’m going to just gently introduce you to sprintf().

sprintf() follows the general printf formatting standard but instead of echoing the output (like printf()), it returns a string. The first parameter is the string format template, and the rest are the replacements for the template.

Time to learn the very first, basic formatter: %s. This stands for string. The string you specify in the position in the arguments will be replaced. Let’s check it out:

$first = 'Ford';
$second = 'Chevrolet';

$out = sprintf('Some like %s, others like %s.', $first, $second);

This will output Some like Ford, others like Chevrolet.. You can see that the first variable is passed in as a string in the first place. The second goes in the second place.

Other ways you could have done this are like:

$first = 'Ford';
$second = 'Chevrolet';

$out = 'Some like ' . $first . ', others like ' . $second . '.';
// or
$out = "Some like {$first}, others like {$second}.";

As a simple example, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of benefit. But, let’s move on.

Let’s check out some more complex formatters and features.

The %d represents a signed integer. The %f represents a locale-aware float.

What do you think this looks like?

$number = 3.6;
$out = sprintf('d is %d, f is %f', $number, $number);

It’s d is 3, f is 3.600000. The first is the integer representation (notice that it doesn’t round), the second is the float.

Ok, so now I should say that the % actually means that you’re about to issue a formatting instruction. There can be more besides these singular letters. Actually a lot more. Let’s look at padding a number.

The ' character indicates a padding character. Let’s check this out.

$page = 26;
$title = 'Chapter 2';
$tableOfContents = sprintf("%s%'.20d", $title, $page);

This will add padding of up to 20 characters minus the length of the page in characters. The output of this is:

Chapter 2..................26

What would that look like without this function?

$page = 26;
$title = 'Chapter 2';
$dots = str_repeat('.', 20 - strlen($page));
$tableOfContents = $title . $dots . $page;

Not that bad but I hope you can see how this starts to make things easier to understand and build - especially when dealing with string templates and concatenation.

There’s so much more here to learn. Check out sprintf() for more!