Question: I need to buff out a line of text with a varying but large number of whitespace. I can figure out a janky way of doing a loop and adding whitespace to $foo, then splicing that into the text, but it is not an elegant solution.

Answer: 
I need a little more info. Are you just appending to some text or do you need to insert it?

Either way, one easy way to get repetition is perl's 'x' operator, eg.

```
" " x 20000

```

will give you 20K spaces.

If have an existing string ($s say) and you want to pad it out to 20K, try

```
$s .= (" " x (20000 - length($s)))

```

BTW, Perl has [an extensive set of operators](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html) - well worth studying if you're serious about the language.

UPDATE: The question as originally asked (it has since been edited) asked about 20K spaces, not a "lot of whitespace", hence the 20K in my answer.
If you always want the string to be a certain length you can use [`sprintf`](http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sprintf.html):

For example, to pad out `$var` with white space so it 20,000 characters long use:

```
$var = sprintf("%-20000s",$var);

```