Question

I’m looking to calculate if a value of a variable in java is equal to 0.00 which is currently defined as a big decimal .

I have tried a variety of ways to do this including:
tempListPrice.getAmount() == 0.00;

tempListPrice.getAmount().equals(0.00);

public static final zeroed = 0.00
tempListPrice.getAmount().equals(zeroed); 

Keep in mind, I’ve done quite a bit of googling to try to find an easy way to compare this. How do I compare the value of tempListPrice to see if it equals 0.00 , which is defined earlier as a big decimal datatype.

How do I do this? (Sorry Im quite new to Java).

Thanks

Answer 1

Okay, upon further research you will want equals or compareTo. You probably want

tempListPrice.getAmount().compareTo(BigDecimal.ZERO);

or

tempListPrice.getAmount().equals(BigDecimal.ZERO);

But honestly need to decide which better fits the semantics of your program. Keep in mind that the reason this is tricky is because floats don’t really have a notion of exactly equals, they’re intrinsically fuzzy, approximate entities. You will need to carefully review your code to make sure this is valid for your circumstances.

Anyway, the following points from the Javadoc should be enough for you to decide:

(equals) Compares this BigDecimal with the specified Object for equality. Unlike compareTo, this method considers two BigDecimal objects equal only if they are equal in value and scale (thus 2.0 is not equal to 2.00 when compared by this method).

cf.

(compareTo) Compares this BigDecimal with the specified BigDecimal. Two BigDecimal objects that are equal in value but have a different scale (like 2.0 and 2.00) are considered equal by this method. This method is provided in preference to individual methods for each of the six boolean comparison operators (<, ==, >, >=, !=, <=). The suggested idiom for performing these comparisons is: (x.compareTo(y) 0), where is one of the six comparison operators.