Question

I have the following to format a string:

'%.2f' % n

If n is a negative zero (-0, -0.000 etc) the output will be -0.00.

How do I make the output always 0.00 for both negative and positive zero values of n?

(It is fairly straight forward to achieve this but I cannot find what I would call a succinct pythonic way. Ideally there is a string formatting option that I am not aware of.)

Answer 1

Add zero:

>>> a = -0.0
>>> a + 0
0.0

which you can format:

>>> '{0:.3f}'.format(a + 0)
'0.000'