Question

I notice some issues with the Java float precision

       Float.parseFloat("0.0065") - 0.001  // 0.0055000000134110451
       new Float("0.027") - 0.001          // 0.02600000000700354575
       Float.valueOf("0.074") - 0.001      // 0.07399999999999999999

I not only have a problem with Float but also with Double.

Can someone explain what is happening behind the scenes, and how can we get an accurate number? What would be the right way to handle this when dealing with these issues?

Answer 1

The problem is simply that float has finite precision; it cannot represent 0.0065 exactly. (The same is true of double, of course: it has greater precision, but still finite.)

A further problem, which makes the above problem more obvious, is that 0.001 is a double rather than a float, so your float is getting promoted to a double to perform the subtraction, and of course at that point the system has no way to recover the missing precision that a double could have represented to begin with. To address that, you would write:

float f = Float.parseFloat("0.0065") - 0.001f;

using 0.001f instead of 0.001.