Question

If I have an array of doubles that each have EXACTLY two decimal places, add them up altogether via a loop, and print out the total, what comes out is a number with MORE THAN two decimal places. Which is weird, because theoretically, adding two numbers that each have 2 and only 2 decimal places will NEVER produce a number that has a non-zero digit beyond the hundredths place.

Try executing this code:

double[] d = new double[2000];
for (int i = 0; i < d.length; i++) {
    d[i] = 9.99;
}

double total = 0,00;
for (int i = 0; i < d.length; i++) {
    total += d[i];
    if (("" + total).matches("[0-9]+\\.[0-9]{3,}")) { // if there are 3 or more decimal places in the total
        System.out.println("total: " + total + ", " + i); // print the total and the iteration when it occured
    }
}

In my computer, this prints out:

total: 59.940000000000005, 5

If I round off the total to two decimal places then I’d get the same number as I would if I manually added 9.99 six times on a calculator. But how come this is happening and where are the extra decimal places coming from? Am I doing something wrong or (I doubt this is likely) is this a Java bug?

Answer 1

Are you familiar with base 10 to base 2 conversion (decimal to binary) for fractions? If not, look it up.

Then you’ll see that although 9.99 looks pretty normal in base 10, it doesn’t really look that nice in binary; It looks like a repeating decimal, but in binary. I’m sure you’ve seen a repeating decimal before, right? It doesn’t end. But Java (or any language for that matter) has to save that infinite sequence of digits into a limited number of bytes. And that’s when the extra digits appear. When you convert that truncated binary back to decimal, you’re really dealing with a different number. The number stored in the variable isn’t 9.99 exactly, it something like 9.9999999991 (just an example, I didn’t work out the math).

But you’re probably interested on how to solve this, right? Look up the BigDecimal class. That’s what you want to use for your calculations, especially when dealing with currency. Also, look up DecimalFormat, which is a class for writing a number as a properly formatted string. I think it does rounding for you when you want to show only 2 decimal digits and your number has a lot more, for example.