Monthly Archives: April 2014

Python: Pulling Apart IEEE Floats for Decimal conversion

While attempting to convert floats precisely to Decimals the other day I was caught out by the fact that Python 2.6’s print function defers to whatever the underlying C compiler’s printf function does. This meant that on Linux I got one result when I asked for ‘%.31f’ % math.pi, and on Windows – something completely different. This lack of portability is a pain, and I had to work around it.

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