Floating point -> string conversions

[John Fouhy]

Can someone explain these differences?
'3.1415926535897931'

Why do the string and default floating point representations get rounded?

(and is this documented anywhere?)

 

[Alex Martelli]

Why do the string and default floating point representations get rounded?

(and is this documented anywhere?)

Sure, right in the "Tutorial (start here)" for example.
http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/tut/node16.html


Alex

 

[John Fouhy]

Sure, right in the "Tutorial (start here)" for example.
http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/tut/node16.html
Alex

I knew I should have looked in the tutorial, rather than just the
"numeric types" section of the library reference :-/

Actually, that page doesn't mention that '%f' will give you a
different rounding again...

 

[John Fouhy]

I have another related question...
Traceback (most recent call last):
'2147483648'

Is this a bug?

(python 2.3.4)

 

[Steve Holden]

I have another related question...



Traceback (most recent call last):


'2147483648'

Is this a bug?

(python 2.3.4)

I don't think so. The fact of the matter is that a %d format token
explicitly expects an integral value.

The fact that %s coerces things makes us expect more of other format
tokens, but what would you expect %d to do with 2147483648.5?

regards
Steve

 

[John Fouhy]

The fact that %s coerces things makes us expect more of other format
tokens, but what would you expect %d to do with 2147483648.5?

I'd expect it to give me "2147483648", since that would be consistent
with its other behaviour

(eg: eval('"%d" % 1.5') == '1')

I guess what annoys me is that python encourages you to not worry
about the difference between ints and longs (which is great) (unless
you're doing high performance computing), but then something like this
can cause code to stop working just because you've passed a border
which is almost invisible.

(of course, this means that one solution which I would be happy with
is for python to reject any non-integer/long arguments to "%d" )