How-to | Pad a number with leading zeros #
A common requirement when you have a column of numbers is to format all numbers so that they have the same length, adding leading zeros if needed. This can be done in the Prepare recipe using a Formula .
Format function #
The function to use is
format
. For example, to ensure that all values of the column
mycolumn
are padded to have a length of 11, including leading zeros, use:
format("%011d",
mycolumn)

It helps to know the usual formula rules to refer the values of columns, as described in the Dataiku reference documentation .
For example, if working with a column named
my column
(note the space), you would instead use
format("%011d",
numval("my
column"))
See also
Beyond this use case,
format
can be a very powerful function that uses Java string formatting capabilities. See this
Java reference
for more details.