Question

I am performing a simple multiplication with BigDecimal and I have found some strange behaviour when multiplying by zero (multiplying by zero is correct in this use-case).

Basic maths tells me that anything multiplied by zero will equal zero (see:Zero Product Property and Multiplication Properties)

However, the following code will consistently fail with the same error:

assertEquals(new BigDecimal(0), new BigDecimal(22.3).multiply(new BigDecimal(0)));

java.lang.AssertionError: 
Expected :0
Actual   :0E-48

Is this an inaccuracy with BigDecimal or is there some niche branch of maths that I’m missing somewhere?

Notes: JDK 1.6.0_27 running in IntelliJ 11

Answer 1

You can’t use the equals() method to compare BigDecimals, like this assertion does. That is because this equals function will compare the scale. If the scale is different, equals() will return false, even if they are the same number mathematically.

You can however use compareTo() to do what you want:

As @assylias points out, you should also use the new BigDecimal("22.3") constructor to avoid double precision issues.

BigDecimal expected = BigDecimal.ZERO;
BigDecimal actual = new BigDecimal("22.3").multiply(BigDecimal.ZERO);
assertEquals(0, expected.compareTo(actual));

There is also a method called signum(), that returns -1, 0 or 1 for negative, zero, and positive. So you can also test for zero with

assertEquals(0, actual.signum());