New formatting lets us do this: '{:.<12}'.format('##') - optional fill character.
Can we do that using old formatting?
(I know we can fill with spaces '%-12s' % '##' )
Also, old formatting lets us do this: '%-*s' % (12, '##') - variable length.
Can we do that using new formatting?
For doing variable length using new-format , you can use nesting of replacements -
>>> '{:{}<{}}'.format('##','.',12) '##..........' >>> '{:{}<{}}'.format('##','-',12) '##----------' >>> '{:{}<{}}'.format('##','-',20) '##------------------' Even spaces as fill character -
>>> '{:{}<{}}'.format('##',' ',20) '## ' Please note you do not always need to use nesting of replacements, you can directly specify them in the format as well -
>>> '{: <12}'.format('##') '## ' You can also specify the position of each argument to decide which argument goes where. Example -
>>> '{2:{0}<{1}}'.format('.',12,'##') '##..........' >>> '{0:{1}<{2}}'.format('##','-',20) '##------------------' 
With format you can nest the replacements:
'{:.<{}}'.format('##',12) So format is more powerful. Optional fill characters are not possible with %.
For your first part of the question, you can left align and use a space as the fill char using a width of 12:
'%-*s' % (12, '##') can be replaced with '{: <12}'.format('##').
For the second part no you cannot specify the fill character with old style formatting.
There is a nice site here that shows most of what you can and cannot do with old vs new, a snippet that covers Padding and aligning strings:
Padding and aligning strings
By default values are formatted to take up only as many characters as needed to represent the content. It is however also possible to define that a value should be padded to a specific length.
Unfortunately the default alignment differs between old and new style formatting. The old style defaults to right aligned while for new style it's left.
Align right: Old '%10s' % ('test',) New '{:>10}'.format('test') Align left: Old '%-10s' % ('test',) New '{:10}'.format('test') By argument:
In the previous example, the value '10' is encoded as part of the format string. However, it is possible to also supply such values as an argument.
Old '%*s' % ((- 8), 'test') New '{:<{}s}'.format('test', 8) Again, new style formatting surpasses the old variant by providing more control over how values are padded and aligned. You are able to choose the padding character:
This operation is not available with old-style formatting.
New '{:_<10}'.format('test') Output And also center align values:
This operation is not available with old-style formatting.
New '{:^10}'.format('test') 
{} will do the job '{: <{}}'.format('##',var) or '{: <{var}}'.format('##,var=var')