I didn't know you could specify the decimal length with a padl function?

>padl() is indeed what you want.
>
>>This is what V.dbase help says about STR
>>
>>STR( [, [, [, ]]])
>>
>>expC
>>
>>The character to pad the beginning of the returned character string with when the length of the returned string is less than digits long. The default pad character is a space. If you want to specify a value for , you must also specify values for <
>>length expN> and . You can specify more than one character for , but STR( ) uses only the first one.