preserving blank space padding when using fgetcsv

The first time I sent this message to the list, this is what bounced back... "Hi. This is the qmail-send program at pb1.pair.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. <php-general@lists.php.net>: This message is looping: it already has my Delivered-To line. (#5.4.6)" So I am resending it. I apologize if anyone is getting this message twice...... Hello, I've been researching this for most of the day and am unable to find an answer. I'm using fgetcsv to read a comma delimited file (Microsoft Excel CSV). I'm trying to create a PHP application which will read a csv file line by line, remove the commas and preserve the padding that is in each column. That means if a column is a fixed length of 15 characters and the actual text in that column is only 5 characters long, the application will preserve the extra 10 blank spaces. I'm able to open and read the csv using fgetcsv: $handle = fopen ($filename, "r"); while ($mpt_line = fgetcsv ($handle, filesize ($filename), ",")) { Then I check each member of that array to make sure it is the proper length for that column: if (strlen($mpt_line[0])<4) { str_pad($mpt_line[0], 4, " ", STR_PAD_RIGHT); } When all of the length checks are finished I remove the commas and then print out the finished product: } $no_commas = str_replace(",", "", $mpt_line); print "aa/".$no_commas[0]."/aa"; For output all I get is the actual text and no blank space padding. Meaning that if the field contains two characters of data it should still appear 4 characters in length. I was hoping to achieve aa/hi /aa instead all I get is aa/hi/aa. Thanks, Roger