formatting text with spaces using printf

[dendenners]

Hi there,
I'm trying to use printf in awk to format some text a certain way. However I'm encountering problems when passing in the text to awk as a shell variable when the variable contains spaces. Say I want to use the text "hello there" as my formatable text. The following works fine:
echo "" | awk '{printf("%-16.16s", "hello there&quot}'
However, say I set header="hello there" in the shell and try
echo "" | awk '{printf("%-16.16s", '$header')}'
I get a parse error because of the space in the variable. How can I print this properly? Thanks
Denis

 

[grega]

Try echo "" | awk '{printf("%-16.16s", header)}' header="$header"

Greg.

 

[dendenners]

Thanks very much

 

[dendenners]

Hi there.
I have another question about this. I want to zero pad a number of the form '12345+' where the plus signifies the sign of the number. The fact that the sign is at the end of the number means that printf does not recognise it as a valid number, and therefore will not print the + when I sihnifiy the variable as being %d. When I signify it as being %s, I can't seem to left-zero-pad the number! Is there a way to zero pad a variable in printf instead of space padding it? Thanks

 

[grega]

If you wanted to pad it to 10 chars, you would do printf("%010s","12345+&quot

Greg.