printf - Printing leading 0's in C

Question

I'm trying to find a good way to print leading 0, such as 01001 for a ZIP Code. While the number would be stored as 1001, what is a good way to do it?

I thought of using either case statements or if to figure out how many digits the number is and then convert it to an char array with extra 0's for printing, but I can't help but think there may be a way to do this with the printf format syntax that is eluding me.

Answer 1

printf("%05d", zipCode);

The 0 indicates what you are padding with and the 5 shows the width of the integer number.

Example 1: If you use "%02d" (useful for dates) this would only pad zeros for numbers in the ones column. E.g., 06 instead of 6.

Example 2: "%03d" would pad 2 zeros for one number in the ones column and pad 1 zero for a number in the tens column. E.g., number 7 padded to 007 and number 17 padded to 017.