Usually to print some ouptut you’d use System.out.printl() or System.out.println() method. It’s easy to use but you can face some difficulties in providing output formatted in a specific way.
To format output you can use either of the following methods (they work the same)
System.out.format(String format, Object... args)System.out.format(Locale l, String format, Object... args)System.out.printf(String format, Object... args)System.out.printf(Locale l, String format, Object... args)
This is the way how those methods should be used:
%[argIndex$][flags][width][.precision] conversion
where:
- argIndex - index of the argument passed within the args array
- flags:
- - - left justify
- + - print sign (e.g. +25, -45.7)
- 0 - pad this argument with zeroes
- , - use local specific separators (e.g. 124,567,678.877)
- ( -enclose a negative number in parenthesis
- width - minimum number of characters to print (nice to keep clean columns)
- precision - number of digits that will be printed after decimal delimiter (for floating points)
- conversion:
- b - boolean
- c - basic types that represent Unicode characters (char, Character, byte, Byte, short, Short)
- d - integral types (byte, Byte, short, Short, int, Integer, long, Long, BigInteger)
- f - floating point (float, Float, double, Double, BigDecimal)
- s - string (for any argument type)
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