Format specifications for real numbers

Question

I would like to print some real numbers to a log file. To make them easy to read I would like them to all have the same width. I know these numbers will range from 0 to 4095.75 so I tried this:

$display("expected= %4.2f, actual= %4.2f", expected, actual)

What I expected to see was this:

expected=   12.25, actual=   12.75 
expected= 4093.25, actual= 4094.75 

But what I got in was this:

expected= 12.25, actual= 12.75 
expected= 4093.25, actual= 4094.75 

How do I force the width of the value above the decimal point to be 4 characters? Section 21.2.1.3 Size of displayed data of the LRM is silent on %f.

Solution

Using %7 works for your values with 2 simulators I tried:

module tb;

real expected, actual;

initial begin
    expected = 12.25; actual=   12.75;
    $display("expected= %7.2f, actual= %7.2f", expected, actual);
    expected= 4093.25; actual= 4094.75;
    $display("expected= %7.2f, actual= %7.2f", expected, actual);
    #5 $finish;
end

endmodule

Output:

expected=   12.25, actual=   12.75
expected= 4093.25, actual= 4094.75