it's possible format data in java?

[paul]

In java, I know it's possible to format words or numbers. An example would be

Code:

System.out.printf("%15s\n", word);

Which would format whatever the value of word in a space with size 15.

Somewhere I read it's possible to do the same if you are returning a value, but did not provide any examples of it. I tried:

Code:

return %15s\n,word;

ovbiusly I'm trying to return "word", can I format it while I return it?

That doesn't work, as I get illegal start of expression as an error.
Thanks

[coco]

Not exactly. It doesn't "return" it at all, it just sends it to the out stream using printf...

If you really needed to format a string you could do so through the string
utilities. For example, substring should be able to cut off the part of the string you want.

String (Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.2)

This means however that you will have to check to see if the string is too short. If you don't you'll get an outofbounds exception. So just check the length, if it's less then what you want to crop it to, just return it, else, crop it with substring and return it.
Greetings.