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I want to remove digits from a float to have a fixed number of digits after the dot, like:
1.923328437452 → 1.923
I need to output as a string to another function, not print.
Also I want to ignore the lost digits, not round them.
round(1.923328437452, 3)
See Python's documentation on the standard types. You'll need to scroll down a bit to get to the round function. Essentially the second number says how many decimal places to round it to.
First, the function, for those who just want some copy-and-paste code:
def truncate(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads a float f to n decimal places without rounding'''
s = '{}'.format(f)
if 'e' in s or 'E' in s:
return '{0:.{1}f}'.format(f, n)
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
return '.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
This is valid in Python 2.7 and 3.1+. For older versions, it's not possible to get the same "intelligent rounding" effect (at least, not without a lot of complicated code), but rounding to 12 decimal places before truncation will work much of the time:
def truncate(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads a float f to n decimal places without rounding'''
s = '%.12f' % f
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
return '.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
Explanation
The core of the underlying method is to convert the value to a string at full precision and then just chop off everything beyond the desired number of characters. The latter step is easy; it can be done either with string manipulation
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
'.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
or the decimal module
str(Decimal(s).quantize(Decimal((0, (1,), -n)), rounding=ROUND_DOWN))
The first step, converting to a string, is quite difficult because there are some pairs of floating point literals (i.e. what you write in the source code) which both produce the same binary representation and yet should be truncated differently. For example, consider 0.3 and 0.29999999999999998. If you write 0.3 in a Python program, the compiler encodes it using the IEEE floating-point format into the sequence of bits (assuming a 64-bit float)
0011111111010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011
This is the closest value to 0.3 that can accurately be represented as an IEEE float. But if you write 0.29999999999999998 in a Python program, the compiler translates it into exactly the same value. In one case, you meant it to be truncated (to one digit) as 0.3, whereas in the other case you meant it to be truncated as 0.2, but Python can only give one answer. This is a fundamental limitation of Python, or indeed any programming language without lazy evaluation. The truncation function only has access to the binary value stored in the computer's memory, not the string you actually typed into the source code.1
If you decode the sequence of bits back into a decimal number, again using the IEEE 64-bit floating-point format, you get
0.2999999999999999888977697537484345957637...
so a naive implementation would come up with 0.2 even though that's probably not what you want. For more on floating-point representation error, see the Python tutorial.
It's very rare to be working with a floating-point value that is so close to a round number and yet is intentionally not equal to that round number. So when truncating, it probably makes sense to choose the "nicest" decimal representation out of all that could correspond to the value in memory. Python 2.7 and up (but not 3.0) includes a sophisticated algorithm to do just that, which we can access through the default string formatting operation.
'{}'.format(f)
The only caveat is that this acts like a g format specification, in the sense that it uses exponential notation (1.23e+4) if the number is large or small enough. So the method has to catch this case and handle it differently. There are a few cases where using an f format specification instead causes a problem, such as trying to truncate 3e-10 to 28 digits of precision (it produces 0.0000000002999999999999999980), and I'm not yet sure how best to handle those.
If you actually are working with floats that are very close to round numbers but intentionally not equal to them (like 0.29999999999999998 or 99.959999999999994), this will produce some false positives, i.e. it'll round numbers that you didn't want rounded. In that case the solution is to specify a fixed precision.
'{0:.{1}f}'.format(f, sys.float_info.dig + n + 2)
The number of digits of precision to use here doesn't really matter, it only needs to be large enough to ensure that any rounding performed in the string conversion doesn't "bump up" the value to its nice decimal representation. I think sys.float_info.dig + n + 2 may be enough in all cases, but if not that 2 might have to be increased, and it doesn't hurt to do so.
In earlier versions of Python (up to 2.6, or 3.0), the floating point number formatting was a lot more crude, and would regularly produce things like
>>> 1.1
1.1000000000000001
If this is your situation, if you do want to use "nice" decimal representations for truncation, all you can do (as far as I know) is pick some number of digits, less than the full precision representable by a float, and round the number to that many digits before truncating it. A typical choice is 12,
'%.12f' % f
but you can adjust this to suit the numbers you're using.
1Well... I lied. Technically, you can instruct Python to re-parse its own source code and extract the part corresponding to the first argument you pass to the truncation function. If that argument is a floating-point literal, you can just cut it off a certain number of places after the decimal point and return that. However this strategy doesn't work if the argument is a variable, which makes it fairly useless. The following is presented for entertainment value only:
def trunc_introspect(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads the float f to n decimal places by looking at the caller's source code'''
current_frame = None
caller_frame = None
s = inspect.stack()
try:
current_frame = s[0]
caller_frame = s[1]
gen = tokenize.tokenize(io.BytesIO(caller_frame[4][caller_frame[5]].encode('utf-8')).readline)
for token_type, token_string, _, _, _ in gen:
if token_type == tokenize.NAME and token_string == current_frame[3]:
next(gen) # left parenthesis
token_type, token_string, _, _, _ = next(gen) # float literal
if token_type == tokenize.NUMBER:
try:
cut_point = token_string.index('.') + n + 1
except ValueError: # no decimal in string
return token_string + '.' + '0' * n
else:
if len(token_string) < cut_point:
token_string += '0' * (cut_point - len(token_string))
return token_string[:cut_point]
else:
raise ValueError('Unable to find floating-point literal (this probably means you called {} with a variable)'.format(current_frame[3]))
break
finally:
del s, current_frame, caller_frame
Generalizing this to handle the case where you pass in a variable seems like a lost cause, since you'd have to trace backwards through the program's execution until you find the floating-point literal which gave the variable its value. If there even is one. Most variables will be initialized from user input or mathematical expressions, in which case the binary representation is all there is.
The result of round is a float, so watch out (example is from Python 2.6):
>>> round(1.923328437452, 3)
1.923
>>> round(1.23456, 3)
1.2350000000000001
You will be better off when using a formatted string:
>>> "%.3f" % 1.923328437452
'1.923'
>>> "%.3f" % 1.23456
'1.235'
n = 1.923328437452
str(n)[:4]
At my Python 2.7 prompt:
>>> int(1.923328437452 * 1000)/1000.0
1.923
The truely pythonic way of doing it is
from decimal import *
with localcontext() as ctx:
ctx.rounding = ROUND_DOWN
print Decimal('1.923328437452').quantize(Decimal('0.001'))
or shorter:
from decimal import Decimal as D, ROUND_DOWN
D('1.923328437452').quantize(D('0.001'), rounding=ROUND_DOWN)
Update
Usually the problem is not in truncating floats itself, but in the improper usage of float numbers before rounding.
For example: int(0.7*3*100)/100 == 2.09.
If you are forced to use floats (say, you're accelerating your code with numba), it's better to use cents as "internal representation" of prices: (70*3 == 210) and multiply/divide the inputs/outputs.
Simple python script -
n = 1.923328437452
n = float(int(n * 1000))
n /=1000
def trunc(num, digits):
sp = str(num).split('.')
return '.'.join([sp[0], sp[1][:digits]])
This should work. It should give you the truncation you are looking for.
So many of the answers given for this question are just completely wrong. They either round up floats (rather than truncate) or do not work for all cases.
This is the top Google result when I search for 'Python truncate float', a concept which is really straightforward, and which deserves better answers. I agree with Hatchkins that using the decimal module is the pythonic way of doing this, so I give here a function which I think answers the question correctly, and which works as expected for all cases.
As a side-note, fractional values, in general, cannot be represented exactly by binary floating point variables (see here for a discussion of this), which is why my function returns a string.
from decimal import Decimal, localcontext, ROUND_DOWN
def truncate(number, places):
if not isinstance(places, int):
raise ValueError("Decimal places must be an integer.")
if places < 1:
raise ValueError("Decimal places must be at least 1.")
# If you want to truncate to 0 decimal places, just do int(number).
with localcontext() as context:
context.rounding = ROUND_DOWN
exponent = Decimal(str(10 ** - places))
return Decimal(str(number)).quantize(exponent).to_eng_string()
>>> from math import floor
>>> floor((1.23658945) * 10**4) / 10**4
1.2365
# divide and multiply by 10**number of desired digits
If you fancy some mathemagic, this works for +ve numbers:
>>> v = 1.923328437452
>>> v - v % 1e-3
1.923
I did something like this:
from math import trunc
def truncate(number, decimals=0):
if decimals < 0:
raise ValueError('truncate received an invalid value of decimals ({})'.format(decimals))
elif decimals == 0:
return trunc(number)
else:
factor = float(10**decimals)
return trunc(number*factor)/factor
You can do:
def truncate(f, n):
return math.floor(f * 10 ** n) / 10 ** n
testing:
>>> f=1.923328437452
>>> [truncate(f, n) for n in range(5)]
[1.0, 1.9, 1.92, 1.923, 1.9233]
Just wanted to mention that the old "make round() with floor()" trick of
round(f) = floor(f+0.5)
can be turned around to make floor() from round()
floor(f) = round(f-0.5)
Although both these rules break around negative numbers, so using it is less than ideal:
def trunc(f, n):
if f > 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, (f - 0.5*10**-n))
elif f == 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, f)
elif f < 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, (f + 0.5*10**-n))
def precision(value, precision):
"""
param: value: takes a float
param: precision: int, number of decimal places
returns a float
"""
x = 10.0**precision
num = int(value * x)/ x
return num
precision(1.923328437452, 3)
1.923
Short and easy variant
def truncate_float(value, digits_after_point=2):
pow_10 = 10 ** digits_after_point
return (float(int(value * pow_10))) / pow_10
>>> truncate_float(1.14333, 2)
>>> 1.14
>>> truncate_float(1.14777, 2)
>>> 1.14
>>> truncate_float(1.14777, 4)
>>> 1.1477
When using a pandas df this worked for me
import math
def truncate(number, digits) -> float:
stepper = 10.0 ** digits
return math.trunc(stepper * number) / stepper
df['trunc'] = df['float_val'].apply(lambda x: truncate(x,1))
df['trunc']=df['trunc'].map('{:.1f}'.format)
int(16.5);
this will give an integer value of 16, i.e. trunc, won't be able to specify decimals, but guess you can do that by
import math;
def trunc(invalue, digits):
return int(invalue*math.pow(10,digits))/math.pow(10,digits);
Here is an easy way:
def truncate(num, res=3):
return (floor(num*pow(10, res)+0.5))/pow(10, res)
for num = 1.923328437452, this outputs 1.923
def trunc(f,n):
return ('%.16f' % f)[:(n-16)]
A general and simple function to use:
def truncate_float(number, length):
"""Truncate float numbers, up to the number specified
in length that must be an integer"""
number = number * pow(10, length)
number = int(number)
number = float(number)
number /= pow(10, length)
return number
There is an easy workaround in python 3. Where to cut I defined with an help variable decPlace to make it easy to adapt.
f = 1.12345
decPlace= 4
f_cut = int(f * 10**decPlace) /10**decPlace
Output:
f = 1.1234
Hope it helps.
Most answers are way too complicated in my opinion, how about this?
digits = 2 # Specify how many digits you want
fnum = '122.485221'
truncated_float = float(fnum[:fnum.find('.') + digits + 1])
>>> 122.48
Simply scanning for the index of '.' and truncate as desired (no rounding).
Convert string to float as final step.
Or in your case if you get a float as input and want a string as output:
fnum = str(122.485221) # convert float to string first
truncated_float = fnum[:fnum.find('.') + digits + 1] # string output
I think a better version would be just to find the index of decimal point . and then to take the string slice accordingly:
def truncate(number, n_digits:int=1)->float:
'''
:param number: real number ℝ
:param n_digits: Maximum number of digits after the decimal point after truncation
:return: truncated floating point number with at least one digit after decimal point
'''
decimalIndex = str(number).find('.')
if decimalIndex == -1:
return float(number)
else:
return float(str(number)[:decimalIndex+n_digits+1])
int(1.923328437452 * 1000) / 1000
>>> 1.923
int(1.9239 * 1000) / 1000
>>> 1.923
By multiplying the number by 1000 (10 ^ 3 for 3 digits) we shift the decimal point 3 places to the right and get 1923.3284374520001. When we convert that to an int the fractional part 3284374520001 will be discarded. Then we undo the shifting of the decimal point again by dividing by 1000 which returns 1.923.
use numpy.round
import numpy as np
precision = 3
floats = [1.123123123, 2.321321321321]
new_float = np.round(floats, precision)
Something simple enough to fit in a list-comprehension, with no libraries or other external dependencies. For Python >=3.6, it's very simple to write with f-strings.
The idea is to let the string-conversion do the rounding to one more place than you need and then chop off the last digit.
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nout+1}f}'[:-1] for x in [2/3, 4/5, 8/9, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2]]
['0.666', '0.800', '0.888', '1.125', '1.250', '1.500']
Of course, there is rounding happening here (namely for the fourth digit), but rounding at some point is unvoidable. In case the transition between truncation and rounding is relevant, here's a slightly better example:
>>> nacc = 6 # desired accuracy (maximum 15!)
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nacc}f}'[:-(nacc-nout)] for x in [2.9999, 2.99999, 2.999999, 2.9999999]]
>>> ['2.999', '2.999', '2.999', '3.000']
Bonus: removing zeros on the right
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nout+1}f}'[:-1].rstrip('0') for x in [2/3, 4/5, 8/9, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2]]
['0.666', '0.8', '0.888', '1.125', '1.25', '1.5']
The core idea given here seems to me to be the best approach for this problem.
Unfortunately, it has received less votes while the later answer that has more votes is not complete (as observed in the comments). Hopefully, the implementation below provides a short and complete solution for truncation.
def trunc(num, digits):
l = str(float(num)).split('.')
digits = min(len(l[1]), digits)
return l[0] + '.' + l[1][:digits]
which should take care of all corner cases found here and here.
Am also a python newbie and after making use of some bits and pieces here, I offer my two cents
print str(int(time.time()))+str(datetime.now().microsecond)[:3]
str(int(time.time())) will take the time epoch as int and convert it to string and join with...
str(datetime.now().microsecond)[:3] which returns the microseconds only, convert to string and truncate to first 3 chars
# value value to be truncated
# n number of values after decimal
value = 0.999782
n = 3
float(int(value*1en))*1e-n
How to round numbers of different length size to the nearest zero or five?
Example:
1291 -> 1290
0.069 -> 0.07
1.08 -> 1.1
14 -> 15
6 -> 5
Tried to use round() and math.ceil() / math.floor() but since the numbers are different each time in length I can’t adapt it dynamically, numbers are returning from a function not an array.
Here you are, thanks for the other solutions:
import math
import decimal
def round_half_up(n):
if (str(n).find(".") > 0):
decimalsource = len(str(n).split(".")[1])
base = 10**decimalsource
number = n*base
rounded = 5 * round(number/5)
result = rounded / base
if (result == int(result)):
return int(result)
else:
return result
else:
return 5 * round(n/5)
print(round_half_up(1291))
print(round_half_up(0.069))
print(round_half_up(1.08))
print(round_half_up(14))
print(round_half_up(6))
print(round_half_up(12.121213))
print(round_half_up(12.3))
print(round_half_up(18.))
print(round_half_up(18))
I wrote a code and explained. It seems working. I didn't take into account negative numbers.
import numpy as np
convDict = {
"0":"0",
"1":"0",
"2":"0",
"3":"5",
"4":"5",
"5":"5",
"6":"5",
"7":"5",
"8":"0",
"9":"0"
}
def conv(f):
str_f = str(f)
# if input is like, 12. or 13.0,so actually int but float data type
# We will get rid of the .0 part
if str_f.endswith(".0"):
str_f = str(int(f))
# We need last character, and other body part
last_f = str_f[-1]
body_f = str_f[:-1]
# if last char is 8 or 9 we should increment body last value
if last_f in "89":
# Number of decimals
numsOfDec = body_f[::-1].find('.')
# numsOfDec = -1 means body is integer, we will add 1
if numsOfDec == -1:
body_f = str(int(body_f) + 1)
else:
# We will add 10 ** -numsOfDec , but it can lead some numerical differences like 0.69999, so i rounded
body_f = str(np.round(float(body_f) + 10 ** (-numsOfDec),numsOfDec))
# Finally we round last char
last_f = convDict[last_f]
return float(body_f + last_f)
And some examples,
print(conv(1291))
print(conv(0.069))
print(conv(1.08))
print(conv(14))
print(conv(6))
print(conv(12.121213))
print(conv(12.3))
print(conv(18.))
print(conv(18))
The kinda pythonic way to round dynamically to nearest five would be to use round() function and input number (divided by 5), the index in which you want the rounding to ocurr [-2: hundreds, -1: tens, 0: whole, 1:1/10ths, 2:1/100s] and multiply result by 5. You can calculate this index by finding how many decimal places there are using decimal module.
i = decimal.Decimal('0.069')
i.as_tuple().exponent
-3
Note that this function takes the number as a string and outputs the number
of decimal places in negative.
After getting this number, make it positive, and there you have the calculated index to put into the round function in the beginning.
round(0.069/5, 3) * 5
You need to also check before all this calculation if the number is a full number (meaning no decimal places--17, 290, 34.0) (in that case you shouldn't use above code at all), which you can easily do by using modulus, so the overall function would look like this:
if number % 1 == 0:
return round(int(number)/5)*5
else:
index = decimal.Decimal(str(number)).as_tuple().exponent
return round(number/5, -index)*5
Hope this helped !
I wanted to create a function that whatever the number received as input, it would cut-off (not round, which could take some decimal higher) every number after the 10th one. It normally works fine, but if I call the function with a number like this:
1234567.123456789123456789
It returns: 1234567.1234567892
And not 1234567.1234567891, as expected.
def cut_to_10(number):
number = str(number)
j = 0
if "." in number:
for i in number:
j += 1
if i == ".":
before_dot = number[:j - 1]
after_dot = number[j:]
if len(after_dot) > 10:
after_dot = after_dot[:10]
return float(before_dot + "." + after_dot)
if "." not in number:
return round(float(number), 10)
EDIT 1:
Also tried this, and the same unexpected result returned.
import numpy as np
def cut_to_10(number):
return np.floor(number * 1e10) / 1e10
EDIT 2:
Considering the amazing explanation given by ShadowRanger, but, considering also that I need more a ceiling precision than a floor one, and given the fact that I still had to work with float, I just decided to change
return float(before_dot + "." + after_dot)
to
return float(before_dot + "." + after_dot) - 2e-10
and it worked fine. 1e-10 didn't work.
1234567.123456789123456789 is not an actual float. You can type it, but it becomes 1234567.1234567892, the closest representable float value; the rounding is occurring before you actually call round.
>>> 1234567.123456789123456789
1234567.1234567892
If you need that much precision, you need to move to decimal.Decimal, which will work just fine:
>>> decimal.Decimal('1234567.123456789123456789')
Decimal('1234567.123456789123456789')
>>> round(_, 10)
Decimal('1234567.1234567891')
Just don't convert back to float, because 1234567.1234567891 doesn't exist (if it did, that's what 1234567.123456789123456789 would have produced), and you'll be back where you started with 1234567.1234567892.
See the other answer for the correct solution. Leaving this one up just because it seems like a more straightforward approach to doing the truncation once you work past the floating point limitation.
import numpy as np
def cut_to_10(number):
return np.floor(number * 1e10) / 1e10
This question already has answers here:
Is floating point arbitrary precision available?
(5 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I want to represent a floating-point number as a string rounded to some number of significant digits, and never using the exponential format. Essentially, I want to display any floating-point number and make sure it “looks nice”.
There are several parts to this problem:
I need to be able to specify the
number of significant digits.
The number of significant digits
needs to be variable, which can't be
done with with the string formatting
operator. [edit] I've been corrected; the string formatting operator can do this.
I need it to be rounded the way a
person would expect, not something
like 1.999999999999
I've figured out one way of doing this, though it looks like a work-round and it's not quite perfect. (The maximum precision is 15 significant digits.)
>>> def f(number, sigfig):
return ("%.15f" % (round(number, int(-1 * floor(log10(number)) + (sigfig - 1))))).rstrip("0").rstrip(".")
>>> print f(0.1, 1)
0.1
>>> print f(0.0000000000368568, 2)
0.000000000037
>>> print f(756867, 3)
757000
Is there a better way to do this? Why doesn't Python have a built-in function for this?
It appears there is no built-in string formatting trick which allows you to (1) print floats whose first significant digit appears after the 15th decimal place and (2) not in scientific notation. So that leaves manual string manipulation.
Below I use the decimal module to extract the decimal digits from the float.
The float_to_decimal function is used to convert the float to a Decimal object. The obvious way decimal.Decimal(str(f)) is wrong because str(f) can lose significant digits.
float_to_decimal was lifted from the decimal module's documentation.
Once the decimal digits are obtained as a tuple of ints, the code below does the obvious thing: chop off the desired number of sigificant digits, round up if necessary, join the digits together into a string, tack on a sign, place a decimal point and zeros to the left or right as appropriate.
At the bottom you'll find a few cases I used to test the f function.
import decimal
def float_to_decimal(f):
# http://docs.python.org/library/decimal.html#decimal-faq
"Convert a floating point number to a Decimal with no loss of information"
n, d = f.as_integer_ratio()
numerator, denominator = decimal.Decimal(n), decimal.Decimal(d)
ctx = decimal.Context(prec=60)
result = ctx.divide(numerator, denominator)
while ctx.flags[decimal.Inexact]:
ctx.flags[decimal.Inexact] = False
ctx.prec *= 2
result = ctx.divide(numerator, denominator)
return result
def f(number, sigfig):
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2663612/nicely-representing-a-floating-point-number-in-python/2663623#2663623
assert(sigfig>0)
try:
d=decimal.Decimal(number)
except TypeError:
d=float_to_decimal(float(number))
sign,digits,exponent=d.as_tuple()
if len(digits) < sigfig:
digits = list(digits)
digits.extend([0] * (sigfig - len(digits)))
shift=d.adjusted()
result=int(''.join(map(str,digits[:sigfig])))
# Round the result
if len(digits)>sigfig and digits[sigfig]>=5: result+=1
result=list(str(result))
# Rounding can change the length of result
# If so, adjust shift
shift+=len(result)-sigfig
# reset len of result to sigfig
result=result[:sigfig]
if shift >= sigfig-1:
# Tack more zeros on the end
result+=['0']*(shift-sigfig+1)
elif 0<=shift:
# Place the decimal point in between digits
result.insert(shift+1,'.')
else:
# Tack zeros on the front
assert(shift<0)
result=['0.']+['0']*(-shift-1)+result
if sign:
result.insert(0,'-')
return ''.join(result)
if __name__=='__main__':
tests=[
(0.1, 1, '0.1'),
(0.0000000000368568, 2,'0.000000000037'),
(0.00000000000000000000368568, 2,'0.0000000000000000000037'),
(756867, 3, '757000'),
(-756867, 3, '-757000'),
(-756867, 1, '-800000'),
(0.0999999999999,1,'0.1'),
(0.00999999999999,1,'0.01'),
(0.00999999999999,2,'0.010'),
(0.0099,2,'0.0099'),
(1.999999999999,1,'2'),
(1.999999999999,2,'2.0'),
(34500000000000000000000, 17, '34500000000000000000000'),
('34500000000000000000000', 17, '34500000000000000000000'),
(756867, 7, '756867.0'),
]
for number,sigfig,answer in tests:
try:
result=f(number,sigfig)
assert(result==answer)
print(result)
except AssertionError:
print('Error',number,sigfig,result,answer)
If you want floating point precision you need to use the decimal module, which is part of the Python Standard Library:
>>> import decimal
>>> d = decimal.Decimal('0.0000000000368568')
>>> print '%.15f' % d
0.000000000036857
Here is a snippet that formats a value according to the given error bars.
from math import floor, log10, round
def sigfig3(v, errplus, errmin):
i = int(floor(-log10(max(errplus,errmin)) + 2))
if i > 0:
fmt = "%%.%df" % (i)
return "{%s}^{%s}_{%s}" % (fmt % v,fmt % errplus, fmt % errmin)
else:
return "{%d}^{%d}_{%d}" % (round(v, i),round(errplus, i), numpy.round(i))
Examples:
5268685 (+1463262,-2401422) becomes 5300000 (+1500000,-2400000)
0.84312 +- 0.173124 becomes 0.84 +- 0.17
Arbitrary precision floats are needed to properly answer this question. Therefore using the decimal module is a must. There is no method to convert a decimal to a string without ever using the exponential format (part of the original question), so I wrote a function to do just that:
def removeExponent(decimal):
digits = [str(n) for n in decimal.as_tuple().digits]
length = len(digits)
exponent = decimal.as_tuple().exponent
if length <= -1 * exponent:
zeros = -1 * exponent - length
digits[0:0] = ["0."] + ["0"] * zeros
elif 0 < -1 * exponent < length:
digits.insert(exponent, ".")
elif 0 <= exponent:
digits.extend(["0"] * exponent)
sign = []
if decimal.as_tuple().sign == 1:
sign = ["-"]
print "".join(sign + digits)
The problem is trying to round to significant figures. Decimal's "quantize()" method won't round higher than the decimal point, and the "round()" function always returns a float. I don't know if these are bugs, but it means that the only way to round infinite precision floating point numbers is to parse it as a list or string and do the rounding manually. In other words, there is no sane answer to this question.
I want to remove digits from a float to have a fixed number of digits after the dot, like:
1.923328437452 → 1.923
I need to output as a string to another function, not print.
Also I want to ignore the lost digits, not round them.
round(1.923328437452, 3)
See Python's documentation on the standard types. You'll need to scroll down a bit to get to the round function. Essentially the second number says how many decimal places to round it to.
First, the function, for those who just want some copy-and-paste code:
def truncate(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads a float f to n decimal places without rounding'''
s = '{}'.format(f)
if 'e' in s or 'E' in s:
return '{0:.{1}f}'.format(f, n)
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
return '.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
This is valid in Python 2.7 and 3.1+. For older versions, it's not possible to get the same "intelligent rounding" effect (at least, not without a lot of complicated code), but rounding to 12 decimal places before truncation will work much of the time:
def truncate(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads a float f to n decimal places without rounding'''
s = '%.12f' % f
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
return '.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
Explanation
The core of the underlying method is to convert the value to a string at full precision and then just chop off everything beyond the desired number of characters. The latter step is easy; it can be done either with string manipulation
i, p, d = s.partition('.')
'.'.join([i, (d+'0'*n)[:n]])
or the decimal module
str(Decimal(s).quantize(Decimal((0, (1,), -n)), rounding=ROUND_DOWN))
The first step, converting to a string, is quite difficult because there are some pairs of floating point literals (i.e. what you write in the source code) which both produce the same binary representation and yet should be truncated differently. For example, consider 0.3 and 0.29999999999999998. If you write 0.3 in a Python program, the compiler encodes it using the IEEE floating-point format into the sequence of bits (assuming a 64-bit float)
0011111111010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011
This is the closest value to 0.3 that can accurately be represented as an IEEE float. But if you write 0.29999999999999998 in a Python program, the compiler translates it into exactly the same value. In one case, you meant it to be truncated (to one digit) as 0.3, whereas in the other case you meant it to be truncated as 0.2, but Python can only give one answer. This is a fundamental limitation of Python, or indeed any programming language without lazy evaluation. The truncation function only has access to the binary value stored in the computer's memory, not the string you actually typed into the source code.1
If you decode the sequence of bits back into a decimal number, again using the IEEE 64-bit floating-point format, you get
0.2999999999999999888977697537484345957637...
so a naive implementation would come up with 0.2 even though that's probably not what you want. For more on floating-point representation error, see the Python tutorial.
It's very rare to be working with a floating-point value that is so close to a round number and yet is intentionally not equal to that round number. So when truncating, it probably makes sense to choose the "nicest" decimal representation out of all that could correspond to the value in memory. Python 2.7 and up (but not 3.0) includes a sophisticated algorithm to do just that, which we can access through the default string formatting operation.
'{}'.format(f)
The only caveat is that this acts like a g format specification, in the sense that it uses exponential notation (1.23e+4) if the number is large or small enough. So the method has to catch this case and handle it differently. There are a few cases where using an f format specification instead causes a problem, such as trying to truncate 3e-10 to 28 digits of precision (it produces 0.0000000002999999999999999980), and I'm not yet sure how best to handle those.
If you actually are working with floats that are very close to round numbers but intentionally not equal to them (like 0.29999999999999998 or 99.959999999999994), this will produce some false positives, i.e. it'll round numbers that you didn't want rounded. In that case the solution is to specify a fixed precision.
'{0:.{1}f}'.format(f, sys.float_info.dig + n + 2)
The number of digits of precision to use here doesn't really matter, it only needs to be large enough to ensure that any rounding performed in the string conversion doesn't "bump up" the value to its nice decimal representation. I think sys.float_info.dig + n + 2 may be enough in all cases, but if not that 2 might have to be increased, and it doesn't hurt to do so.
In earlier versions of Python (up to 2.6, or 3.0), the floating point number formatting was a lot more crude, and would regularly produce things like
>>> 1.1
1.1000000000000001
If this is your situation, if you do want to use "nice" decimal representations for truncation, all you can do (as far as I know) is pick some number of digits, less than the full precision representable by a float, and round the number to that many digits before truncating it. A typical choice is 12,
'%.12f' % f
but you can adjust this to suit the numbers you're using.
1Well... I lied. Technically, you can instruct Python to re-parse its own source code and extract the part corresponding to the first argument you pass to the truncation function. If that argument is a floating-point literal, you can just cut it off a certain number of places after the decimal point and return that. However this strategy doesn't work if the argument is a variable, which makes it fairly useless. The following is presented for entertainment value only:
def trunc_introspect(f, n):
'''Truncates/pads the float f to n decimal places by looking at the caller's source code'''
current_frame = None
caller_frame = None
s = inspect.stack()
try:
current_frame = s[0]
caller_frame = s[1]
gen = tokenize.tokenize(io.BytesIO(caller_frame[4][caller_frame[5]].encode('utf-8')).readline)
for token_type, token_string, _, _, _ in gen:
if token_type == tokenize.NAME and token_string == current_frame[3]:
next(gen) # left parenthesis
token_type, token_string, _, _, _ = next(gen) # float literal
if token_type == tokenize.NUMBER:
try:
cut_point = token_string.index('.') + n + 1
except ValueError: # no decimal in string
return token_string + '.' + '0' * n
else:
if len(token_string) < cut_point:
token_string += '0' * (cut_point - len(token_string))
return token_string[:cut_point]
else:
raise ValueError('Unable to find floating-point literal (this probably means you called {} with a variable)'.format(current_frame[3]))
break
finally:
del s, current_frame, caller_frame
Generalizing this to handle the case where you pass in a variable seems like a lost cause, since you'd have to trace backwards through the program's execution until you find the floating-point literal which gave the variable its value. If there even is one. Most variables will be initialized from user input or mathematical expressions, in which case the binary representation is all there is.
The result of round is a float, so watch out (example is from Python 2.6):
>>> round(1.923328437452, 3)
1.923
>>> round(1.23456, 3)
1.2350000000000001
You will be better off when using a formatted string:
>>> "%.3f" % 1.923328437452
'1.923'
>>> "%.3f" % 1.23456
'1.235'
n = 1.923328437452
str(n)[:4]
At my Python 2.7 prompt:
>>> int(1.923328437452 * 1000)/1000.0
1.923
The truely pythonic way of doing it is
from decimal import *
with localcontext() as ctx:
ctx.rounding = ROUND_DOWN
print Decimal('1.923328437452').quantize(Decimal('0.001'))
or shorter:
from decimal import Decimal as D, ROUND_DOWN
D('1.923328437452').quantize(D('0.001'), rounding=ROUND_DOWN)
Update
Usually the problem is not in truncating floats itself, but in the improper usage of float numbers before rounding.
For example: int(0.7*3*100)/100 == 2.09.
If you are forced to use floats (say, you're accelerating your code with numba), it's better to use cents as "internal representation" of prices: (70*3 == 210) and multiply/divide the inputs/outputs.
Simple python script -
n = 1.923328437452
n = float(int(n * 1000))
n /=1000
def trunc(num, digits):
sp = str(num).split('.')
return '.'.join([sp[0], sp[1][:digits]])
This should work. It should give you the truncation you are looking for.
So many of the answers given for this question are just completely wrong. They either round up floats (rather than truncate) or do not work for all cases.
This is the top Google result when I search for 'Python truncate float', a concept which is really straightforward, and which deserves better answers. I agree with Hatchkins that using the decimal module is the pythonic way of doing this, so I give here a function which I think answers the question correctly, and which works as expected for all cases.
As a side-note, fractional values, in general, cannot be represented exactly by binary floating point variables (see here for a discussion of this), which is why my function returns a string.
from decimal import Decimal, localcontext, ROUND_DOWN
def truncate(number, places):
if not isinstance(places, int):
raise ValueError("Decimal places must be an integer.")
if places < 1:
raise ValueError("Decimal places must be at least 1.")
# If you want to truncate to 0 decimal places, just do int(number).
with localcontext() as context:
context.rounding = ROUND_DOWN
exponent = Decimal(str(10 ** - places))
return Decimal(str(number)).quantize(exponent).to_eng_string()
>>> from math import floor
>>> floor((1.23658945) * 10**4) / 10**4
1.2365
# divide and multiply by 10**number of desired digits
If you fancy some mathemagic, this works for +ve numbers:
>>> v = 1.923328437452
>>> v - v % 1e-3
1.923
I did something like this:
from math import trunc
def truncate(number, decimals=0):
if decimals < 0:
raise ValueError('truncate received an invalid value of decimals ({})'.format(decimals))
elif decimals == 0:
return trunc(number)
else:
factor = float(10**decimals)
return trunc(number*factor)/factor
You can do:
def truncate(f, n):
return math.floor(f * 10 ** n) / 10 ** n
testing:
>>> f=1.923328437452
>>> [truncate(f, n) for n in range(5)]
[1.0, 1.9, 1.92, 1.923, 1.9233]
Just wanted to mention that the old "make round() with floor()" trick of
round(f) = floor(f+0.5)
can be turned around to make floor() from round()
floor(f) = round(f-0.5)
Although both these rules break around negative numbers, so using it is less than ideal:
def trunc(f, n):
if f > 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, (f - 0.5*10**-n))
elif f == 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, f)
elif f < 0:
return "%.*f" % (n, (f + 0.5*10**-n))
def precision(value, precision):
"""
param: value: takes a float
param: precision: int, number of decimal places
returns a float
"""
x = 10.0**precision
num = int(value * x)/ x
return num
precision(1.923328437452, 3)
1.923
Short and easy variant
def truncate_float(value, digits_after_point=2):
pow_10 = 10 ** digits_after_point
return (float(int(value * pow_10))) / pow_10
>>> truncate_float(1.14333, 2)
>>> 1.14
>>> truncate_float(1.14777, 2)
>>> 1.14
>>> truncate_float(1.14777, 4)
>>> 1.1477
When using a pandas df this worked for me
import math
def truncate(number, digits) -> float:
stepper = 10.0 ** digits
return math.trunc(stepper * number) / stepper
df['trunc'] = df['float_val'].apply(lambda x: truncate(x,1))
df['trunc']=df['trunc'].map('{:.1f}'.format)
int(16.5);
this will give an integer value of 16, i.e. trunc, won't be able to specify decimals, but guess you can do that by
import math;
def trunc(invalue, digits):
return int(invalue*math.pow(10,digits))/math.pow(10,digits);
Here is an easy way:
def truncate(num, res=3):
return (floor(num*pow(10, res)+0.5))/pow(10, res)
for num = 1.923328437452, this outputs 1.923
def trunc(f,n):
return ('%.16f' % f)[:(n-16)]
A general and simple function to use:
def truncate_float(number, length):
"""Truncate float numbers, up to the number specified
in length that must be an integer"""
number = number * pow(10, length)
number = int(number)
number = float(number)
number /= pow(10, length)
return number
There is an easy workaround in python 3. Where to cut I defined with an help variable decPlace to make it easy to adapt.
f = 1.12345
decPlace= 4
f_cut = int(f * 10**decPlace) /10**decPlace
Output:
f = 1.1234
Hope it helps.
Most answers are way too complicated in my opinion, how about this?
digits = 2 # Specify how many digits you want
fnum = '122.485221'
truncated_float = float(fnum[:fnum.find('.') + digits + 1])
>>> 122.48
Simply scanning for the index of '.' and truncate as desired (no rounding).
Convert string to float as final step.
Or in your case if you get a float as input and want a string as output:
fnum = str(122.485221) # convert float to string first
truncated_float = fnum[:fnum.find('.') + digits + 1] # string output
I think a better version would be just to find the index of decimal point . and then to take the string slice accordingly:
def truncate(number, n_digits:int=1)->float:
'''
:param number: real number ℝ
:param n_digits: Maximum number of digits after the decimal point after truncation
:return: truncated floating point number with at least one digit after decimal point
'''
decimalIndex = str(number).find('.')
if decimalIndex == -1:
return float(number)
else:
return float(str(number)[:decimalIndex+n_digits+1])
int(1.923328437452 * 1000) / 1000
>>> 1.923
int(1.9239 * 1000) / 1000
>>> 1.923
By multiplying the number by 1000 (10 ^ 3 for 3 digits) we shift the decimal point 3 places to the right and get 1923.3284374520001. When we convert that to an int the fractional part 3284374520001 will be discarded. Then we undo the shifting of the decimal point again by dividing by 1000 which returns 1.923.
use numpy.round
import numpy as np
precision = 3
floats = [1.123123123, 2.321321321321]
new_float = np.round(floats, precision)
Something simple enough to fit in a list-comprehension, with no libraries or other external dependencies. For Python >=3.6, it's very simple to write with f-strings.
The idea is to let the string-conversion do the rounding to one more place than you need and then chop off the last digit.
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nout+1}f}'[:-1] for x in [2/3, 4/5, 8/9, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2]]
['0.666', '0.800', '0.888', '1.125', '1.250', '1.500']
Of course, there is rounding happening here (namely for the fourth digit), but rounding at some point is unvoidable. In case the transition between truncation and rounding is relevant, here's a slightly better example:
>>> nacc = 6 # desired accuracy (maximum 15!)
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nacc}f}'[:-(nacc-nout)] for x in [2.9999, 2.99999, 2.999999, 2.9999999]]
>>> ['2.999', '2.999', '2.999', '3.000']
Bonus: removing zeros on the right
>>> nout = 3 # desired number of digits in output
>>> [f'{x:.{nout+1}f}'[:-1].rstrip('0') for x in [2/3, 4/5, 8/9, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2]]
['0.666', '0.8', '0.888', '1.125', '1.25', '1.5']
The core idea given here seems to me to be the best approach for this problem.
Unfortunately, it has received less votes while the later answer that has more votes is not complete (as observed in the comments). Hopefully, the implementation below provides a short and complete solution for truncation.
def trunc(num, digits):
l = str(float(num)).split('.')
digits = min(len(l[1]), digits)
return l[0] + '.' + l[1][:digits]
which should take care of all corner cases found here and here.
Am also a python newbie and after making use of some bits and pieces here, I offer my two cents
print str(int(time.time()))+str(datetime.now().microsecond)[:3]
str(int(time.time())) will take the time epoch as int and convert it to string and join with...
str(datetime.now().microsecond)[:3] which returns the microseconds only, convert to string and truncate to first 3 chars
# value value to be truncated
# n number of values after decimal
value = 0.999782
n = 3
float(int(value*1en))*1e-n