Pad or truncate string based on fixed length

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Currently have code that looks something like;

print '{: <5}'.format('test')

This will pad my string with ' ' if it is less than 5 characters. If the string is more than 5 characters, I'd need the string to be truncated.

Without explicitly checking the length of my string before formatting it, is there a better way to pad if less than fixed length or truncate if greater than fixed length?

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