Formatting a string with Printf
requires defining a format for that
string.
let str = Printf.sprintf("%6s", "dope");
/* str => " dope" */
The format is the first argument. At compile-time it is interpreted as a
format6
type value.
So, what if you want a dynamically created format value? Simply
concatenating some strings together won't do it because then the type will
be string
and that's not going to compile.
The Scanf.format_from_string
function can help.
let some_num = 6;
let format_str = "%" ++ string_of_int(some_num) ++ "s";
let format = Scanf.format_from_string(format_str, "%s");
let str = Printf.sprintf(format, "dope");
/* str => " dope" */
We can convert our string that has the appearance of a format into an actual
format6
type. To do this, we have to tell format_from_string
what types
each of the formats is going to have -- hence the second argument %s
.