Formatting a string to be a constant length in Python

Question

Lets say I have a few string titles: ``` title0 = 'USA' title1 = 'Canada' ``` And I want to append a list of '#' characters to the front and back of these titles to give them a constant length so they look like: ``` ######## USA ######## ####### Canada ###### ``` With 1 space buffering the start and end of the text. Obviously I can't always get a symmetric number of symbols around the word. Is there a way to do this with built in Python string formatting?

Accepted Answer

Python's `str.format()` has a few options that should get you what you want. You can read more about them here. This should give you what you wanted.

```
title0 = '{:#^{width}}'.format(' USA ', width=19)
title1 = '{:#^{width}}'.format(' Canada ', width=19)
```

Or using a similar syntax for the new f-strings/formatted string literals:

```
width = 19
country = 'USA'
title0 = f'{country:#^{width}}'
```

Formatting a string to be a constant length in Python

Solution

Problem