Question

What is the reason that you cannot use zero at the beginning of a number when converting the number to a sequence?

Code example

map(int,str(08978789787))

which gives Syntax error.

I would like to convert numbers which leading digit is zero to a sequence.
How can you convert such a number to a sequence?

Answer 1

This happens because the leading zero means you are writing an octal number and you can’t have 9 or 8 in an octal number. See:

>>> a = 0123
>>> a
83
>>> a = 010
>>> a
8

You can just do:

>>> map(int, '08978789787')
[0, 8, 9, 7, 8, 7, 8, 9, 7, 8, 7]