Limiting floats to two decimal points

0 votes

I want a to be rounded to 13.95.

>>> a
13.949999999999999
>>> round(a, 2)
13.949999999999999

The round function does not work the way I expected.

Dec 2, 2020 in Python by Roshni
• 10,520 points
3,187 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

You are running into the old problem with floating-point numbers that not all numbers can be represented exactly. The command line is just showing you the full floating-point form from memory.

With floating-point representation, your rounded version is the same number. Since computers are binary, they store floating-point numbers as an integer and then divide it by a power of two so 13.95 will be represented in a similar fashion to 125650429603636838/(2**53).

Double precision numbers have 53 bits (16 digits) of precision and regular floats have 24 bits (8 digits) of precision. The floating-point type in Python uses double-precision to store the values.

For example,

>>> 125650429603636838/(2**53)
13.949999999999999

>>> 234042163/(2**24)
13.949999988079071

>>> a = 13.946
>>> print(a)
13.946
>>> print("%.2f" % a)
13.95
>>> round(a,2)
13.949999999999999
>>> print("%.2f" % round(a, 2))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(a))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.95
>>> print("{:.15f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.949999999999999

If you are after only two decimal places (to display a currency value, for example), then you have a couple of better choices:

  1. Use integers and store values in cents, not dollars, and then divide by 100 to convert to dollars.
  2. Or use a fixed point number like a decimal.
answered Dec 2, 2020 by Gitika
• 65,910 points

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