Newbe Dev Stack

Answer : This character (len=:), allocatable :: input_trim is certainly syntactically correct in Fortran 2003. You don't say what the error that gfortran raises is, so I can't comment on why it doesn't accept the line -- perhaps you have an old version of the compiler installed. With an up-to-date Fortran compiler ( eg Intel Fortran v14.xxx) you don't need to allocate the character variable's size prior to assigning to it, you can simply write input_trim = trim(input) Note that read(*,*) input_trim won't work.

Answer : I think you are talking about padding strings with spaces. One way to do this is with string format codes. For example, if you want to pad a string to a certain length with spaces, use something like this: String padded = String.format("%-20s", str); In a formatter, % introduces a format sequence. The - means that the string will be left-justified (spaces will be added on the right of the string). The 20 means the resulting string will be 20 characters long. The s is the character string format code, and ends the format sequence. There's a few approaches for this: Create a char array then use Arrays.fill, and finally convert to a String Iterate through a loop adding a space each time Use String.format