From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Charles C. Berry" <ccberry@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: Babel trims leading 0s for certain numbers of tables
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:50:55 -0700
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To: Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com>
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On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Ken Mankoff wrote:

>
> I've just discovered that when Org results are returned in a table, they 
> are modified in that leading 0s are removed. Is this a feature? A bug?

Take your choice. The feature/bug happens deep down:

- org-babel-execute-src-block
   - org-babel-execute:shell
     - org-babel-import-elisp-from-file
       - org-babel-string-read
         - org-babel-read

which tries hard to convert strings to numbers.

I haven't looked hard at this, but it seems like it would take a 
significant amount of tooling to set things up to make this 
conversion optional.

> Is there a workaround for this? Leading 0s are not removed if the result 
> is a string, but in many cases a string of numbers is still a string and 
> should retain those 0s.

Lots of ways, I guess. But they would all involve either tricking 
org-babel-read and then cleaning up the mess or processing the output 
outside of org-babel-import-from-elisp.

For the latter, send the output to a file. Maybe use :file or pipe it from 
your script. Then visit the file, convert it to a table, and capture the 
result as a string. I think you can do this with a :post callout.

HTH,

Chuck