How to pad zeroes to a string?

Just use the rjust method of the string object.

This example will make a string of 10 characters long, padding as necessary.

>>> t = 'test'
>>> t.rjust(10, '0')
>>> '000000test'

Besides zfill, you can use general string formatting:

print(f'{number:05d}') # (since Python 3.6), or
print('{:05d}'.format(number)) # or
print('{0:05d}'.format(number)) # or (explicit 0th positional arg. selection)
print('{n:05d}'.format(n=number)) # or (explicit `n` keyword arg. selection)
print(format(number, '05d'))

Documentation for string formatting and f-strings.

For Python 3.6+ using f-strings:

>>> i = 1
>>> f"{i:0>2}"  # Works for both numbers and strings.
'01'
>>> f"{i:02}"  # Works only for numbers.
'01'

For Python 2 to Python 3.5:

>>> "{:0>2}".format("1")  # Works for both numbers and strings.
'01'
>>> "{:02}".format(1)  # Works only for numbers.
'01'

>>> '99'.zfill(5)
'00099'
>>> '99'.rjust(5,'0')
'00099'

if you want the opposite:

>>> '99'.ljust(5,'0')
'99000'

str(n).zfill(width) will work with strings, ints, floats... and is Python 2.x and 3.x compatible:

>>> n = 3
>>> str(n).zfill(5)
'00003'
>>> n = '3'
>>> str(n).zfill(5)
'00003'
>>> n = '3.0'
>>> str(n).zfill(5)
'003.0'