Format in kotlin string templates

Question

Kotlin has an excellent feature called string templates. I really love it.

 val i = 10 
 val s = \"i = $i\" // evaluates to \"i = 10\"

But

Answer 1

As a workaround, There is a Kotlin stdlib function that can be used in a nice way and fully compatible with Java's String format (it's only a wrapper around Java's String.format())

See Kotlin's documentation

Your code would be:

val pi = 3.14159265358979323
val s = "pi = %.2f".format(pi)

Answer 2

Since String.format is only an extension function (see here) which internally calls java.lang.String.format you could write your own extension function using Java's DecimalFormat if you need more flexibility:

fun Double.format(fracDigits: Int): String {
    val df = DecimalFormat()
    df.setMaximumFractionDigits(fracDigits)
    return df.format(this)
}

println(3.14159.format(2)) // 3.14

Answer 3

Its simple, Use:

val str:String = "%.2f".format(3.14159)

Answer 4

Unfortunately, there's no built-in support for formatting in string templates yet, as a workaround, you can use something like:

"pi = ${pi.format(2)}"

the .format(n) function you'd need to define yourself as

fun Double.format(digits: Int) = "%.${digits}f".format(this)

There's clearly a piece of functionality here that is missing from Kotlin at the moment, we'll fix it.

Answer 5

Kotlin's String class has a format function now, which internally uses Java's String.format method:

/**
 * Uses this string as a format string and returns a string obtained by substituting the specified arguments,
 * using the default locale.
 */
@kotlin.internal.InlineOnly
public inline fun String.Companion.format(format: String, vararg args: Any?): String = java.lang.String.format(format, *args)

Usage

val pi = 3.14159265358979323
val formatted = String.format("%.2f", pi) ;
println(formatted)
>>3.14

Answer 6

A couple of examples:

infix fun Double.f(fmt: String) = "%$fmt".format(this)
infix fun Double.f(fmt: Float) = "%${if (fmt < 1) fmt + 1 else fmt}f".format(this)

val pi = 3.14159265358979323

println("""pi = ${pi f ".2f"}""")
println("pi = ${pi f .2f}")