[Tutor] Is there anyway to set how many numbers are used after the decimal in floating numbers?

[Danny Yoo]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Nathan Pinno wrote:

> Is there anyway to set how many numbers are used after the decimal in
> floating numbers? It would be nice if the answer could be rounded to 2
> decimal spots, instead of the ten millionths spot.

Hi Nathan,

If you want to print a number with two decimal places, you may want to use
a string formatting operator.  String Formatting allows us to format
numbers into particular ways.  For example:

#######
def to_ten_digits(n):
    """Given a number n, returns a string representation of that
    number with ten digits.  We pad empty spaces with zero."""
    return "%010f" % n
#######


shows that we can turn numbers into ten-digit strings:

#######
>>> to_ten_digits(42)
'042.000000'
#######


This is not what you're asking for, exactly, but take a look at:

    http://www.python.org/doc/lib/typesseq-strings.html
    http://www.python.org/doc/tut/node9.html#SECTION009100000000000000000

for more information on String Formatting: you can do floating point
formatting with it too.