Question

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How to iterate between 0.1f and 1.0f with 0.1f increments in Java?

Part of my program needs to use values inside a while loop as:

0.1

0.2

0.3

…

0.9

so I need to provide them inside that loop.
Here is the code:

double x = 0.0;
while ( x<=1 )
{
// increment x by 0.1 for each iteration
x += 0.1;
}

I need the output to be EXACTLY:

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

But it actually gives me something like:

0.1

0.2

0.300000000000000000000000004

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.79999999999999999999999999

0.89999999999999999999999999

0.99999999999999999999999999

Answer 1

Welcome to the world of floating point, where 0.1 isn’t 0.1. The problem is that many numbers, including 0.1, cannot be represented exactly in a double. So you aren’t really adding exactly 0.1 to x each time through the loop.

One approach is to use integer arithmetic and divide by 10:

int i = 0;
while (i <= 10) {
    double x = i / 10.0;
    . . .
    i++;
}

Another approach is to make x a BigDecimal, where you can specify that you want a particular precision. It basically is doing what the above loop does (an integer plus a scale), but packaged up in a nice class with lots of bells and whistles. Oh, and it has arbitrary precision.