How to pad zeroes to a string?

Question

What is a Pythonic way to pad a numeric string with zeroes to the left, i.e. so the numeric string has a specific length?

Answer 1

Quick timing comparison:

setup = '''
from random import randint
def test_1():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return str(num).zfill(7)
def test_2():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return format(num, '07')
def test_3():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return '{0:07d}'.format(num)
def test_4():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return format(num, '07d')
def test_5():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return '{:07d}'.format(num)
def test_6():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return '{x:07d}'.format(x=num)
def test_7():
    num = randint(0,1000000)
    return str(num).rjust(7, '0')
'''
import timeit
print timeit.Timer("test_1()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_2()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_3()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_4()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_5()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_6()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)
print timeit.Timer("test_7()", setup=setup).repeat(3, 900000)


> [2.281613943830961, 2.2719342631547077, 2.261691106209631]
> [2.311480238815406, 2.318420542148333, 2.3552384305184493]
> [2.3824197456864304, 2.3457239951596485, 2.3353268829498646]
> [2.312442972404032, 2.318053102249902, 2.3054072168069872]
> [2.3482314132374853, 2.3403386400002475, 2.330108825844775]
> [2.424549090688892, 2.4346475296851438, 2.429691196530058]
> [2.3259756401716487, 2.333549212826732, 2.32049893822186]

I've made different tests of different repetitions. The differences are not huge, but in all tests, the zfill solution was fastest.