[xsl] text output and space padding

[angie.tong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I'm new to XML and XSL technologies so please give me a hand here.  I have
been researching and reading references on XSL and couldn't find a way to
do this.  I need to read an XML file and generate a flat file with fixed
length fields for mainframe.  So that means I need to write data padded
with space if the data does not fill up to the required length.  So
something like this:

               COMPANY A                COMPANY B                    20000

will need to be generated from an XML file for example:

<policies>
  <sender_info>COMPANY A</sender_info>
  <carrier_info>COMPANY B</carrier_info>
  <amount>200.00</amount>
</policies>

The trick here is that the trailing space after each field might be
different depending on the length of the data itself.  I thought about
writing a "function" to output spaces depending on the parameter input.
But then I will need to do a for loop with index like in C:
for (i=0;i<30;i++)
which I know it cannot be done in XSL.  Any ideas?

Angie


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