Text formatting error: '=' alignment not allowed in string format specifier

Question

What does \'=\' alignment mean in the following error message, and why does this code cause it?

>&         


        

Answer 1

In my case, I was trying to zero-pad a string instead of a number.

The solution was simply to convert the text to a number before applying the padding:

num_as_text = '23'
num_as_num = int(num_as_text)
padded_text = f'{num_as_num:03}'