Mark Dickinson <dickinsm@gmail.com> added the comment: Yep, there's an oddity here that's directly inherited from C's sprintf family of functions, namely that in %e-style formatting you give the number of digits after the point (= one less than the total number of significant digits), and in %g-style formatting you give the total number of significant digits instead. Can you give a pointer, or link, to the documentation section you were looking at? The description at: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting-operations looks fine to me. Note 3, which relates to the '%e' and '%f'-style formatting, talks about number of places after the point. Note 4, which relates to '%g' formatting, talks about the total number of significant digits. ---------- nosy: +mark.dickinson _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue13433> _______________________________________