best way to remove leading zeros from a tuple like string

[Ben Bacarisse]

"Michael F. Stemper" <michael.stemper at gmail.com> writes:

> On 2018-05-20 16:19, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>> bruceg113355 at gmail.com writes:
>>
>>> Lets say I have the following tuple like string.
>>>    (128, 020, 008, 255)
>>>
>>> What is the best way to to remove leading zeroes and end up with the following.
>>>    (128, 20, 8, 255)        -- I do not care about spaces
>>
>> You could use a regexp:
>>
>>    import re
>>    ...
>>    re.sub(r"(?<![0-9])0+(?=[0-9])", "", "(128, 020, 008, 255)")
>>
>> I post this because I think it works (interesting corner cases are 10005
>> and 000), 
>
> Seeing this makes me realize that mine will eliminate any numbers that
> are all leading zero, including '0'. Also, forms like '-0042' will be
> left unchanged.

I realised after posting the negatives won't work.  Not, I suspect, an
issue for the OP but -0042 can certainly be said to have "leading
zeros".

> Maybe splitting it into integer forms and sending each through
> str( int( ) ) would be the safest.

Yup.  I gave a version of that method too which handles negative numbers
by accident (by leaving the - in place!).  A better version would be

  re.sub(r"-?[0-9]+", lambda m: str(int(m.group(0))), s)

<snip>
-- 
Ben.