Adding Leading Zeros to Strings in Pandas Dataframe

In Pandas, working with strings can sometimes require modifying their formatting. A common task is to add leading zeros to strings in a dataframe. This is especially useful when dealing with numerical data that needs to be converted to a string format, such as IDs or dates.

To accomplish this, you can leverage the str attribute of a Pandas Series. This attribute provides access to a variety of string manipulation methods, including one specifically for adding leading zeros: zfill().

To add leading zeros to the 'ID' column in the provided dataframe, use the following code:

df['ID'] = df['ID'].str.zfill(15)

The zfill() method takes a single argument, which specifies the desired total length of the resulting strings. In this case, it is set to 15, resulting in strings with 15 characters, any missing characters being filled with zeros on the left.

The updated dataframe will have the following format:

                ID    text1    text 2
0  000000002345656     blah      blah
1  000000000003456     blah      blah
2  000000000541304     blah      blah        
3  000000000201306       hi      blah        
4  000012313201308    hello      blah 

For more information and methods available for string manipulation in Pandas, refer to the documentation at http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/text.html.