I have a really simple question that I can't seem to find anywhere online cause I'm not sure what to search for.

I have an integer and I need to format it to always be three long (ie. 001). But I can't figure out how to do this in PHP.

I tried rounding it with round() like this "round(1, -3)"

but that didn't work.

How about counting the string lenght of the integer*, then prepend zero characters if needed?

* I assume PHP will automatically convert an integer to string when using e.g. strlen().

I can always resort to that, it just seems like its something there should be a function for, since there is in most everything else.

hi there

you can use the string pad function AFAIK there is no number format function that can do it.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.str-pad.php

cheers

Sparky

Hey thanks Sparky! That's perfect!!

no problems.. any time

I cannot imagine why or how round(1, -3) would be expected to do anything like this.

The entire C formatting functionality is available - just try sprintf() in the PHP library. IIRC, "%3d" means a 3-digit decimal number, and "%03d" means a zero-padded same.

So I think sprintf("%03d", $value) will give you what you want. (If you don't know the C 'print' family formatting stuff, it's well worth learning.)