Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

This is the correct behaviour. 

How can this be correct behavior if it was working this way for all the previous 4.3.X versions?  I did check the manual and I see no updates to indicate that this is changed behavior.  In fact, quoting from the manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.sprintf.php

"Each conversion specification consists of a percent sign (%), followed by one or more of these elements, in order: 

An optional padding specifier that says what character will be used for padding the results to the right string size. This may be a space character or a 0 (zero character). The default is to pad with spaces"

So again, sprintf("%3.2f",'1.00') is no longer padding with leading spaces as it was in previous versions.  If it is a changed behavior, please indicate this in the documentation.

OK, looking at /ext/standard formatted_print.c I see what has changed.  Before we were specifying the desired number of characters to pad to the left of the decimal.  Now we are specifying the total desired number of characters the output should be padded to.  So technically, we are indeed "padding the results to the right string size".  Too bad it has been the previous way for so long.

Actually, I did find inconsistency (bug) with the new behavior.

echo sprintf("%06.2f",'1.00');
001.00

echo sprintf("%06.2f",'.01');
000000.01

So which is it?  Pad to 6 characters or pad to 6 on the left of the decimal point?

Sorry, but this actually is a bug. Kind of brain damage.

echo sprintf('%05.2f', 0.02) . "\n";
00000.02

echo sprintf('%05.2f', 2.02) . "\n";
02.02

Although the double-checked documentation is very uncertain about how this should work, it definitely should work one of the ways, not both.

Ilia, recheck.. :)

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.