Format Number as Fixed Width, with Leading Zeros

Format number as fixed width, with leading zeros

There are several solutions to this.

One of them is to use sprintf. This uses C style formatting codes embedded in a character string to indicate the format of any other arguments passed to it. For example, the formatting code %3d means format a number as integer of width 3:

a <- seq(1,101,25)
sprintf("name_%03d", a)
[1] "name_001" "name_026" "name_051" "name_076" "name_101"

Another is formatC and paste:

paste("name", formatC(a, width=3, flag="0"), sep="_")
[1] "name_001" "name_026" "name_051" "name_076" "name_101"

Format variable as 4 digits with leading zeroes

You would use -format operator:

'{0:d4}' -f $variable

https://ss64.com/ps/syntax-f-operator.html

the above will work if your variable is an integer, if not you can cast it to integer:

'{0:d4}' -f [int]$variable

How to add leading zeros?

The short version: use formatC or sprintf.

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The longer version:

There are several functions available for formatting numbers, including adding leading zeroes. Which one is best depends upon what other formatting you want to do.

The example from the question is quite easy since all the values have the same number of digits to begin with, so let's try a harder example of making powers of 10 width 8 too.

anim <- 25499:25504
x <- 10 ^ (0:5)

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paste (and it's variant paste0) are often the first string manipulation functions that you come across. They aren't really designed for manipulating numbers, but they can be used for that. In the simple case where we always have to prepend a single zero, paste0 is the best solution.

paste0("0", anim)
## [1] "025499" "025500" "025501" "025502" "025503" "025504"

For the case where there are a variable number of digits in the numbers, you have to manually calculate how many zeroes to prepend, which is horrible enough that you should only do it out of morbid curiosity.

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str_pad from stringr works similarly to paste, making it more explicit that you want to pad things.

library(stringr)
str_pad(anim, 6, pad = "0")
## [1] "025499" "025500" "025501" "025502" "025503" "025504"

Again, it isn't really designed for use with numbers, so the harder case requires a little thinking about. We ought to just be able to say "pad with zeroes to width 8", but look at this output:

str_pad(x, 8, pad = "0")
## [1] "00000001" "00000010" "00000100" "00001000" "00010000" "0001e+05"

You need to set the scientific penalty option so that numbers are always formatted using fixed notation (rather than scientific notation).

library(withr)
with_options(
  c(scipen = 999), 
  str_pad(x, 8, pad = "0")
)
## [1] "00000001" "00000010" "00000100" "00001000" "00010000" "00100000"

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stri_pad in stringi works exactly like str_pad from stringr.

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formatC is an interface to the C function printf. Using it requires some knowledge of the arcana of that underlying function (see link). In this case, the important points are the width argument, format being "d" for "integer", and a "0" flag for prepending zeroes.

formatC(anim, width = 6, format = "d", flag = "0")
## [1] "025499" "025500" "025501" "025502" "025503" "025504"
formatC(x, width = 8, format = "d", flag = "0")
## [1] "00000001" "00000010" "00000100" "00001000" "00010000" "00100000"

This is my favourite solution, since it is easy to tinker with changing the width, and the function is powerful enough to make other formatting changes.

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sprintf is an interface to the C function of the same name; like formatC but with a different syntax.

sprintf("%06d", anim)
## [1] "025499" "025500" "025501" "025502" "025503" "025504"
sprintf("%08d", x)
## [1] "00000001" "00000010" "00000100" "00001000" "00010000" "00100000"

The main advantage of sprintf is that you can embed formatted numbers inside longer bits of text.

sprintf(
  "Animal ID %06d was a %s.", 
  anim, 
  sample(c("lion", "tiger"), length(anim), replace = TRUE)
)
## [1] "Animal ID 025499 was a tiger." "Animal ID 025500 was a tiger."
## [3] "Animal ID 025501 was a lion."  "Animal ID 025502 was a tiger."
## [5] "Animal ID 025503 was a tiger." "Animal ID 025504 was a lion." 

See also goodside's answer.

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For completeness it is worth mentioning the other formatting functions that are occasionally useful, but have no method of prepending zeroes.

format, a generic function for formatting any kind of object, with a method for numbers. It works a little bit like formatC, but with yet another interface.

prettyNum is yet another formatting function, mostly for creating manual axis tick labels. It works particularly well for wide ranges of numbers.

The scales package has several functions such as percent, date_format and dollar for specialist format types.

How to pad integer printing with leading zeros?

tostring[0]=(char)0; does not write the character representation of 0 into tostring[0]. It writes a zero. You want tostring[0] = '0', with single quotes. And similarly, to write the character representation of a single digit, you can write tostring[1] = '0' + hours (If hours is 5, then '0' + 5 is the character value used to represent 5 in the local character set. Thankfully, it was standardized long ago that those representations should be sequential so that sort of thing works.) But, unless the point of this exercise is to avoid using printf, you should really just use printf.

Display number with leading zeros

In Python 2 (and Python 3) you can do:

number = 1
print("%02d" % (number,))

Basically % is like printf or sprintf (see docs).

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For Python 3.+, the same behavior can also be achieved with format:

number = 1
print("{:02d}".format(number))

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For Python 3.6+ the same behavior can be achieved with f-strings:

number = 1
print(f"{number:02d}")

How to output numbers with leading zeros in JavaScript?

NOTE: Potentially outdated. ECMAScript 2017 includes String.prototype.padStart.

You'll have to convert the number to a string since numbers don't make sense with leading zeros. Something like this:

function pad(num, size) {
    num = num.toString();
    while (num.length < size) num = "0" + num;
    return num;
}

Or, if you know you'd never be using more than X number of zeros, this might be better. This assumes you'd never want more than 10 digits.

function pad(num, size) {
    var s = "000000000" + num;
    return s.substr(s.length-size);
}

If you care about negative numbers you'll have to strip the - and read it.

Pad with leading zeros to common width

Simply following the advise in @joran's comment,

DB <- data.frame(
HOUR  = c(1, 10, 5, 20),
ID  = c(2, 4, 6, 6))

NHOUR <- sprintf("%02d",DB$HOUR) # fix to 2 characters 

cbind(NHOUR, DB) # combine old and newdata 
  NHOUR HOUR ID
1    01    1  2
2    10   10  4
3    05    5  6
4    20   20  6

Update 2013-01-21 23:42:00Z Inspired by daroczig's performance test below, and because I wanted to try out the microbenchmark package, I've updated this question with a small performance test of my own comparing the three different solutions suggested in this thread.

# install.packages(c("microbenchmark", "stringr"), dependencies = TRUE)
require(microbenchmark)
require(stringr)

SPRINTF <- function(x) sprintf("%02d", x)
FORMATC <- function(x) formatC(x, width = 2,flag = 0)
STR_PAD <- function(x) str_pad(x, width=2, side="left", pad="0")

x <- round(runif(1e5)*10)
res <- microbenchmark(SPRINTF(x), STR_PAD(x), FORMATC(x), times = 15)

## Print results:
print(res)
Unit: milliseconds
        expr       min        lq    median        uq      max
1 FORMATC(x) 623.53785 629.69005 638.78667 671.22769 679.8790
2 SPRINTF(x)  34.35783  34.81807  35.04618  35.53696  37.1622
3 STR_PAD(x) 116.54969 118.41944 118.97363 120.05729 163.9664

### Plot results:
boxplot(res)

Format number in python with leading zeros and fixed decimal places

num = 0.1423
print '%06.2f' %num

The six indicates the total field width and includes the decimal point. The zero indicates include leading zeros, the 2 indicates the precision.

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