If you’re familiar with the sprintf function, you may already know this or perhaps, just like for me, it will be a novelty.
I was looking for a fast way of adding leading zeros to a number determined on a loop, for example, I want to call 40 images dynamically and while I know that they follow this format for example image_XXX where the x’s are replaced by a number leaded by zeros if it’s smaller than 3 digits I had no easy way of adding those zeros.
I just dumbly assumed that the only way was checking the string length, and if it equalled to 1 add two leading zeros, if it equalled to 2 add just one and if it was 3 or bigger, don’t add any. That’s fast enough, and it can be done like this:
1 2 3 4 5 | switch(strlen($number)){ case '1': $number = "00".$number; break; case '2': $number = "0".$number; break; default: $number = $number; } |
But that’s taking up 5 lines of code just for that small formatting, and imagine the implications of the same example but on a 10 digit number. So I found you can do the following with the same result and in just one line of code:
1 | sprintf("%03d",$number); |
Enjoy!
Update:
It was used for answering this question on the 13th of Novemeber.
