What do numbers starting with 0 mean in python?

Solution 1:

These are numbers represented in base 8 (octal numbers). Some examples:

Python 2 (old format)

Note: these forms only work on Python 2.x.

011 is equal to 1⋅8¹ + 1⋅8⁰ = 9,

0100 is equal to 1⋅8² + 0⋅8¹ + 0⋅8⁰ = 64,

027 is equal to 2⋅8¹ + 7⋅8⁰ = 16 + 7 = 23.

Python 3 (new format)

In Python 3, one must use 0o instead of just 0 to indicate an octal constant, e.g. 0o11 or 0o27, etc. Python 2.x versions >= 2.6 supports both the new and the old format.

0o11 is equal to 1⋅8¹ + 1⋅8⁰ = 9,

0o100 is equal to 1⋅8² + 0⋅8¹ + 0⋅8⁰ = 64,

0o27 is equal to 2⋅8¹ + 7⋅8⁰ = 16 + 7 = 23.

Solution 2:

In Python 2 (and a few more programming languages), these represent octal numbers.

In Python 3, 011 no longer works and you would use 0o11 instead.

In response to edit: and they are regular integers. They are just specified different way; and they are automatically converted by Python to an internal integer representation (which is base-2 actually, so both 9 and 011 are internally converted to 0b1001).

Solution 3:

Numbers in Octal numerical system. Other prefixes are 0x for hexadecimal and 0b for binary.