Question

I want to format a number with a decimal point in it with leading zeros.

This

>>> '3.3'.zfill(5)
003.3

considers all the digits and even the decimal point. Is there a function in python that considers only the whole part?

I only need to format simple numbers with no more than five decimal places. Also, using %5f seems to consider trailing instead of leading zeros.

Answer 1

Starting with a string as your example does, you could write a small function such as this to do what you want:

def zpad(val, n):
    bits = val.split('.')
    return "%s.%s" % (bits[0].zfill(n), bits[1])

>>> zpad('3.3', 5)
'00003.3'