How can I output leading zeros in Ruby?

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I'm outputting a set of numbered files from a Ruby script. The numbers come from incrementing a counter, but to make them sort nicely in the directory, I'd like to use leading zeros in the filenames. In other words

file_001...

instead of

file_1

Is there a simple way to add leading zeros when converting a number to a string? (I know I can do "if less than 10.... if less than 100").

6 Answers

As stated by the other answers, "%03d" % number works pretty well, but it goes against the rubocop ruby style guide:

Favor the use of sprintf and its alias format over the fairly cryptic String#% method

We can obtain the same result in a more readable way using the following:

format('%03d', number)

filenames = '000'.upto('100').map { |index| "file_#{index}" }

Outputs

[file_000, file_001, file_002, file_003, ..., file_098, file_099, file_100]

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