Easy pretty printing of floats in python?

python printing formatting floating-point
static_rtti picture static_rtti · Oct 14, 2009 · Viewed 241.8k times · Source

I have a list of floats. If I simply print it, it shows up like this:

[9.0, 0.052999999999999999, 0.032575399999999997, 0.010892799999999999, 0.055702500000000002, 0.079330300000000006]

I could use print "%.2f", which would require a for loop to traverse the list, but then it wouldn't work for more complex data structures. I'd like something like (I'm completely making this up)

>>> import print_options
>>> print_options.set_float_precision(2)
>>> print [9.0, 0.052999999999999999, 0.032575399999999997, 0.010892799999999999, 0.055702500000000002, 0.079330300000000006]
[9.0, 0.05, 0.03, 0.01, 0.06, 0.08]

Answer

Esteban Küber picture Esteban Küber · Oct 14, 2009

As noone has added it, it should be noted that going forward from Python 2.6+ the recommended way to do string formating is with format, to get ready for Python 3+.

print ["{0:0.2f}".format(i) for i in a]

The new string formating syntax is not hard to use, and yet is quite powerfull.

I though that may be pprint could have something, but I haven't found anything.

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