How can I force division to be floating point? Division keeps rounding down to 0?

Nathan Fellman picture Nathan Fellman · Aug 12, 2009 · Viewed 676.1k times · Source

I have two integer values a and b, but I need their ratio in floating point. I know that a < b and I want to calculate a / b, so if I use integer division I'll always get 0 with a remainder of a.

How can I force c to be a floating point number in Python in the following?

c = a / b

Answer

Michael Fairley picture Michael Fairley · Aug 12, 2009

In Python 2, division of two ints produces an int. In Python 3, it produces a float. We can get the new behaviour by importing from __future__.

>>> from __future__ import division
>>> a = 4
>>> b = 6
>>> c = a / b
>>> c
0.66666666666666663