You are running into the old problem with floating point numbers that not all numbers can be represented exactly. The command line is just showing you the full floating point form from memory.
With floating point representation, your rounded version is the same number. Since computers are binary, they store floating point numbers as an integer and then divide it by a power of two so 13.95 will be represented in a similar fashion to 125650429603636838/(2**53).
Double precision numbers have 53 bits (16 digits) of precision and regular floats have 24 bits (8 digits) of precision. The floating point type in Python uses double precision to store the values.
For example,
>>> 125650429603636838/(2**53)
13.949999999999999
>>> 234042163/(2**24)
13.949999988079071
>>> a = 13.946
>>> print(a)
13.946
>>> print("%.2f" % a)
13.95
>>> round(a,2)
13.949999999999999
>>> print("%.2f" % round(a, 2))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(a))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.95
>>> print("{:.15f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.949999999999999
If you are after only two decimal places (to display a currency value, for example), then you have a couple of better choices:
- Use integers and store values in cents, not dollars and then divide by 100 to convert to dollars.
- Or use a fixed point number like decimal.
Rather than using a decimal step directly, it's much safer to express this in terms of how many points you want. Otherwise, floating-point rounding error is likely to give you a wrong result.
You can use the linspace function from the NumPy library (which isn't part of the standard library but is relatively easy to obtain). linspace
takes a number of points to return, and also lets you specify whether or not to include the right endpoint:
>>> np.linspace(0,1,11)
array([ 0. , 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1. ])
>>> np.linspace(0,1,10,endpoint=False)
array([ 0. , 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9])
If you really want to use a floating-point step value, you can, with numpy.arange
.
>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.arange(0.0, 1.0, 0.1)
array([ 0. , 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9])
Floating-point rounding error will cause problems, though. Here's a simple case where rounding error causes arange
to produce a length-4 array when it should only produce 3 numbers:
>>> numpy.arange(1, 1.3, 0.1)
array([1. , 1.1, 1.2, 1.3])
Best Answer
Floating point numbers are approximations in many cases. Some integers (and decimals) can be exactly represented by a
float
, but most can't. See Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations.Resulting from this approximative nature of floats, some calculations may yield unexpected results (this isn't directly pertinent to the question, but it illustrates the point quite well):
For example, when you're dealing with money calculations, it's better to use integers, or (if speed is not an issue) the
decimal
module.