padding char array to a specific size matlab

Question

if I have char array,ex: A='hello' of size 5 chars and I want to pad it with another character or set of characters to make its size =16 how can I pad this array in matlab ? and what should I use for padding can I use zero or I must use another character ?

Answer 1

You can use sprintf:

result = sprintf('%-16s','hello');

Or it can be created using array concatenation:

ex = 'hello';
result = [ex blanks(16-length(ex))];

Padding with other characters(e.g. 'a'):

ex = 'hello';
result = [ex repmat('a',1,16-length(ex))];

*As of MATLAB R2016b you can use pad function.