Question

I am reading a text file with floating point numbers, all with either 1 or 2 decimal points. I am using float() to convert a line into a float, and raising a ValueError if that fails. I am storing all floats in a list. When printing it out, I’d like to print it out as a 2 decimal places floating point.

Assume I have a text file with the numbers -3.65, 9.17, 1. I read each one, and once I convert them to float and append them to a list. Now in Python 2, calling float(-3.65) returns -3.65. In Python 3 however, float(-3.65) returns -3.6499999999999999 which loses its precision.

I want to print the list of floats, [-3.6499999999999999, 9.1699999999999999, 1.0] with 2 decimal points only. Doing something along the lines of '%.1f' % round(n, 1) would return a string. How can I return a list of all two decimal points of floats, and not strings? So far, I rounded it using [round(num, 2) for num in list] but would need to set the decimal points / precision instead of round().

Answer 1

In a word, you can’t.

3.65 cannot be represented exactly as a float. The number that you’re getting is the nearest number to 3.65 that has an exact float representation.

The difference between (older?) Python 2 and 3 is purely due to the default formatting.

I am seeing the following both in Python 2.7.3 and 3.3.0:

In [1]: 3.65
Out[1]: 3.65

In [2]: '%.20f' % 3.65
Out[2]: '3.64999999999999991118'

For an exact decimal datatype, see decimal.Decimal.