Pad out value with asterisks

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Does anybody have a code snippet where I can easily display a numeric value with leading asterisks?

I am using:

IFormatProvider myFormatProvider = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("nl-NL").NumberFormat;

to give me the CultureInfo I want to use, and I can get a value to display a numeric value in the correct format, for example:

theNumberToConvert.ToString("N4", myFormatProvider);

which will give me, for example:

10.000.000,0000

...but how would I get this value to pad out this value to something like:

**.***.**10.000.000,0000 ?

Posted 7-Aug-14 1:45am

penguin5000

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2 solutions

Solution 1

There is nothing standard I know of to do that, although there is a String.PadLeft[^] method which would put in the stars.
Probably, what I would do is use PadLeft to fill the unused space with stars, then use String.ToCharArray to get the characters and fill in the thousands separator manually throughout.
Then just use the string constructor that takes a char array as a parameter to convert it back to a string.

Posted 7-Aug-14 2:00am

OriginalGriff

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Keith Barrow · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-07T02:15:00

Again, I've nothing standard, this works as far as I've tested (assumes fixed width padding):

C#

var cultureInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("nl-NL");
var numberFormatProvider = cultureInfo.NumberFormat;
var chars = theumber.ToString("0000,0000,000,000.#####",  numberFormatProvider).ToCharArray();
for (int i=0; i< chars.Length; i++)
{
    if(chars[i]=='.'  || chars[i]==',' )
        continue;
    if(chars[i] != '0')
        break;
    chars[i] = '*';
}
string paddedText = new string(chars);

Could do with some refactoring though - has magic strings for the separtors (come can be got from cultureInfo.NumberFormat) and doesn't handle negatives at the very least. I'd also abstract out to en extension method.