syntactic.autopad_zeros

syntactic.autopad_zeros(obj: int | str | list[int] | list[str]) → list[str]

Automatically pad numbers with leading zeros for consistent sorting.

Handles integers, purely numeric strings, and strings with a leading or trailing numeric component (e.g. “A1”, “1-EV”). Raises when only some strings in the input match a numeric pattern, since no consistent padding width can be inferred.

Parameters:

obj (int, str, list of int, or list of str) – Value(s) to pad.

Returns:

Zero-padded string(s).

Return type:

list of str

Examples

>>> autopad_zeros([1, 10, 100])
['001', '010', '100']
>>> autopad_zeros(["A1", "B10", "C100"])
['A001', 'B010', 'C100']