Formatting number with space placeholder in expression

Ignition
1

I am attempting to format a combination of text and number to be displayed in a label but with white space placeholders instead of leading zeroes.
Example: “Flow: " + numberFormat(tag(”[default]/Flow"), “##0.00”).
From the example above the output can be:
Flow: 5.2
Flow: 10.5
Flow 107.1
I can obviously set a pattern to include leading zeroes but I would like to “reserve” the space instead so the output would look something like this with underscores replaced by spaces:
Flow: __5.2
Flow: _10.5
Flow 107.1
I can easily do that in scripting but would like to avoid it for something as simple as text formatting.
For the sake of discussion I am assuming a monospaced font.

2

Try stringFormat instead, like so:

stringFormat("Flow: %6.2f", {[default]Flow})

And you really should avoid the tag() expression function in UIs.

3

Thanks, that works. I noticed it doesn’t quite work with the default Dialog font but as long as I pick anything that is monospaced such as Courier New or Consolas it works great.
The tag() expression was leftover from my simplification of the original expression. What is the problem with using tag() in UI bindings? How would I handle indirect addressing in the example above if I had multiple different flow tags?

4

Start here: