How to format a floating number to fixed width in Python

Question

How do I format a floating number to a fixed width with the following requirements:

1. Leading zero if n < 1
2. Add trailing decimal zero(s) to fill up f

Answer 1

for x in numbers:
    print "{:10.4f}".format(x)

prints

   23.2300
    0.1233
    1.0000
    4.2230
 9887.2000

The format specifier inside the curly braces follows the Python format string syntax. Specifically, in this case, it consists of the following parts:

• The empty string before the colon means "take the next provided argument to format()" – in this case the x as the only argument.
• The 10.4f part after the colon is the format specification.
• The f denotes fixed-point notation.
• The 10 is the total width of the field being printed, lefted-padded by spaces.
• The 4 is the number of digits after the decimal point.