A Tip A Day – Python Tips #12: Using zfill() for ‘0’ padding

zfill() function is type of padding function. This function fills only with '0'. Takes the resultant width of the string as argument. This is useful to pad a numeric string values.

Lets learn a Python Tip which can help you in string manipulation. It is very useful various data processings.

zfill() function:

zfill() function is type of padding function.

This function fills only with ‘0’. Takes the resultant width of the string as argument.

This is useful to pad a numeric string values.

string = "10"
string.zfill(10)

Output:

'0000000010'

A realtime scenario of usage:

In some of the applications we may have a 5 digit numeric string to represent any ID.

In that case, we can pad with zeros for the desired length of the string and do the increment by 1 (convert to int and increase 1).

ID = "15"
ID = ID.zfill(5)
print("Original ID:" + ID)

next_ID = str(int(ID)+1).zfill(5)
print("Next ID:" + next_ID)

Output:

Original ID:00015
Next ID:00016

I hope you enjoyed learning various types of split functions in python.

Lets explore more about Python in future tips.

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A Tip A Day – Python Tip #11: Split string using partition, rpartition & splitlines

A Tip A Day – Python Tip #10: 2 reasons to use Python Type Hints

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Asha Ponraj
Asha Ponraj

Data science and Machine Learning enthusiast | Software Developer | Blog Writter

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