How to format the length of a line of text using fprintf in a loop

I am using MATLAB R2018a trying to print a text file using the following script which uses fprintf in a for loop. It prints the text file data corretly however I need the text to be right justified as can be seen in lines 1-13 of the second picture, however, lines 14-24 are indented to the left due to the length of "timestr" changing. I have tried adding '%42f' before X in my loop to set the line length to 42 characters but it did not work. Any help would be appreciated.

[madhan ravi]

uploading a picture is less useful than providing the code

[David Low]

This is the code:

case_id=1

case_idstr=num2str(case_id);

metabol=strcat(' 1.40');

time=-60;

timestr=num2str(time);

X=strcat(timestr,' 24.6 23.30 0.070 49.90',metabol,'\n');

fid = fopen(strcat('bcfile',case_idstr,'.txt'),'wt');

fprintf(fid,' time Ta Twall va rh activ\n');

fprintf(fid,' [min] [øC] [øC] [m/s] [ ] [met]\n');

for loop=1:73

fprintf(fid,' ');

fprintf(fid,X);

time=time+5;

timestr=num2str(time);

X=strcat(timestr,' 24.6 23.30 0.070 49.90',metabol,'\n');

end

fclose(fid);

Answer 1

[Jos (10584)]

Why don't you format the values within each string to be nicely aligned, before sending them to a text file?

A = rand(4,3) ;
for k=1:size(A,1)
    str = sprintf('%8.3f', A(k,:)) ;
    fprintf('%s\n', str)
end