Question

I’m parsing an XML file with some coordinates in Python to write a transformed output file. The problem is that some coordinates are -0.00 and I’m having some problems parsing them in another system. I would need them to be 0.00 instead of -0.00. How could I achieve such thing?

This is what I’m doing so far:

for node in nodes:
    nodeName = node.attrib['name']
    nodeParts = nodeName.split('.')
    nodeName = nodeParts[0]

    if nodeName == 'scene':
        f.write(nodeParts[1] + '\t')

        position = node.find('position')
        f.write('%.2f ' % float(position.attrib['x']))
        f.write('%.2f ' % float(position.attrib['y']))
        f.write('%.2f\n' % float(position.attrib['z']))

Answer 1

If the value is equal to zero (either positive or negative), take the absolute value:

>>> x = float('-0.0')
>>> x
-0.0
>>> abs(x)
0.0