Number formatting and leading zeros

[Egghead]

After seeing this post I got thinking about how a month is displayed as "1" and not "01" and would like to know if there is a better way to set up how a number should be displayed. (I'm not talking about using the date format here, I'm talking about leading zeros for any number)

Is there not some way of initialising the variable format as well as the value when you declare it? Floats, ints, doubles etc are all well and good but when it comes to leading zeros, most solutions I have seen involve converting the number into a string which may not always be ideal.

[siteguru]

AFAIK there is no other way to add leading zeros other than to prepend them as a string.

[Egghead]

AFAIK there is no other way to add leading zeros other than to prepend them as a string.

Time to get in touch with the developers!

Are all programming languages like this?

[Chris82]

Hi.

There are some ways, using printf or the other month letter which includes the leading zero

// using date
echo date ('d - m - Y', time());

// appending zeroes to a string
printf('%02d', 1);

// should print 01 

edit: misread your post a bit. you can also use number_format but printf is probably the best solution.

[siteguru]

you can also use number_format but printf is probably the best solution.

number_format() doesn't document any method to prepend leading zeros ... it simply lets you format a number with grouped thousands and define the decimal point character. The output of the function is a string

[GamerZ]

i got this from php.net

$i = 1;
str_pad($i,2, "0",STR_PAD_LEFT) 

Just 1 line, not to sure whether it is efficient.

[Egghead]

Hi guys, thanks for the thoughts.
I've seen the stuff on php.net (including the number_format function, which is as siteguru said primarily for formatting the decimal and thousands separator) As I mentioned , there only seems to be the option to convert the number to a string to add leading zeros. Common examples, I perhaps should have posted in the first case:

$length = "5";
$number = "223";
// Method 1
echo str_repeat("0", ($length-strlen ($number))) . $number;
// Method 2
echo str_pad($number, $length, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT); 

I just can't believe is that there is no way to specify the number format to include leading zeros. I was hoping to be able to show a nice example from a spreadsheet using wildcards and hashes and so on however it appears it is not quite what I thought and I found that the numbers are converted to text to include leading zeros!
I can't recall my university days much (alcoholic haze) but maybe there was some way to do this in C++?
I know all is not lost, there are always work-arounds and things like string arithmatic can be achieved, but I thought this thread would create some strong arguments for something that perhaps is missing from our beloved language.