I'm trying to represent a number with leading and trailing zeros so that the total width is 7 including the decimal point. For example, I want to represent "5" as "005.000". It seems that string formatting will let me do one or the other but not both. Here's the output I get in Ipython illustrating my problem:
In [1]: '%.3f'%5
Out[1]: '5.000'
In [2]: '%03.f'%5
Out[2]: '005'
In [3]: '%03.3f'%5
Out[3]: '5.000'
Line 1 and 2 are doing exactly what I would expect. Line 3 just ignores the fact that I want leading zeros. Any ideas? Thanks!