Question

I am taking practice exercises and ran into this issue.

This problem asks:

“Prompt for a number greater than 1 and to 4 decimal places. Format
and write the number to the page displaying with only 2 digits past
the decimal point using the toFixed() method. (e.g. 12.35, not
12.3453)

Since this method is very new, it doesn’t work in older browsers. See
if you can get only 2 digits past the decimal point to show without
using toFixed().”

I found the answer to the hard part through the archives here, Math.round(n*100)/100. Thanks for that. But when I tried the “easy” way, I get nothing. My work is at jsFiddle, but in a nutshell:

var num = prompt("Give me a number greater than one, with 4 decimal places.");
var num2 = prompt("Great! Do one more, please!");


num = Math.round(num*100)/100;
num2 = num2.toFixed(2);


alert(num);
alert(num2);

The exercise did not ask for a second number, but I wanted to use both methods in separate incidences. When I run this it does not alert anything. I know that it is hanging at the toFixed statement, because when I comment it out it alerts both as expected, num1 at 2 decimal places, and num2 as it was prompted (i.e. 1.2345).

So here is what I have done so far:

Mozilla’s developer page shows this format: n.toFixed(1);// Returns “12345.7”: note rounding

Seems exactly what I am doing.

I copied and pasted all of it in my Sublime, making sure that I called the .js file just before the closing body tag, to make sure it wasn’t some loading problem I don’t understand.

Plus all sorts of little tweaking.

Sorry to keep asking these questions, but since I am self-study, I have where else to go!

Answer 1

You need to use parseFloat. Using the function will convert the string to a float type variable, allowing for the toFixed function to work properly.

num2 = parseFloat(num2).toFixed(2);