Limiting floats to two decimal points

Question

I want a to be rounded to 13.95.

>>> a
13.949999999999999
>>> round(a, 2)
13.949999999999999

The ro

Answer 1

Most numbers cannot be exactly represented in floats. If you want to round the number because that's what your mathematical formula or algorithm requires, then you want to use round. If you just want to restrict the display to a certain precision, then don't even use round and just format it as that string. (If you want to display it with some alternate rounding method, and there are tons, then you need to mix the two approaches.)

>>> "%.2f" % 3.14159
'3.14'
>>> "%.2f" % 13.9499999
'13.95'

And lastly, though perhaps most importantly, if you want exact math then you don't want floats at all. The usual example is dealing with money and to store 'cents' as an integer.