A nice trick to use in place of the various print formats:

(1) Pad with spaces to the right:

('hi' + '        ')[:8]

(2) Pad with leading zeros on the left:

('0000' + str(2))[-4:]

A nice trick to use in place of the various print formats:

(1) Pad with spaces to the right:

('hi' + '        ')[:8]

(2) Pad with leading zeros on the left:

('0000' + str(2))[-4:]

This approach is not recommended in Python but the logic is useful for languages and macros that lack quality text formatting functions. :)