Thread: Printf syntax woes

I have this line of code:

System.out.printf("%8.1f", solutions[i][j]);

Where solutions is a two-dimensional array. This is within a nested for loop, but don't worry about all of that. This line of code is successfully printing the value of "solutions", rounding to 1 decimal, and aligning each result to the far right of 8 spaces.

I want to align it in the center, not the far right.

So I looked at this site:

Complete Printf for Java Format String Specification

Which says I can use the "^" flag to center the result in the given specified width.

And that I should use this format: %[flags][width][.precision][argsize]typechar

So I wrote this code:

System.out.printf("%^8.1f", solutions[i][j]);

Which compiles, but creates a run time error.

This is the error:

HTML Code:

Exception in thread "main" java.util.UnknownFormatConversionException: Conversion = '^'
        at java.util.Formatter.checkText(Formatter.java:2547)
        at java.util.Formatter.parse(Formatter.java:2533)
        at java.util.Formatter.format(Formatter.java:2469)
        at java.io.PrintStream.format(PrintStream.java:970)
        at java.io.PrintStream.printf(PrintStream.java:871)
        at HW1.printTable(HW1.java:95)
        at HW1.main(HW1.java:23)

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

I believe the documentation you're referring to (and provided a link to) is for a 3rd party add-on or library. The official Java Formatter documentation is here.

Okay, I figured out how to make it left-aligned and it actually looks like how I want it to be. Couldn't find anything on center-alignment...it seems really esoteric. But it doesn't matter- left-alignment looks much nicer than I thought.

Thank you a lot for the help...I never would have known.