What is the best way to compare floats for almost-equality in Python?

Question

It\'s well known that comparing floats for equality is a little fiddly due to rounding and precision issues.

For example: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/2

Answer 1

math.isclose() has been added to Python 3.5 for that (source code). Here is a port of it to Python 2. It's difference from one-liner of Mark Ransom is that it can handle "inf" and "-inf" properly.

def isclose(a, b, rel_tol=1e-09, abs_tol=0.0):
    '''
    Python 2 implementation of Python 3.5 math.isclose()
    https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Modules/mathmodule.c#l1993
    '''
    # sanity check on the inputs
    if rel_tol < 0 or abs_tol < 0:
        raise ValueError("tolerances must be non-negative")

    # short circuit exact equality -- needed to catch two infinities of
    # the same sign. And perhaps speeds things up a bit sometimes.
    if a == b:
        return True

    # This catches the case of two infinities of opposite sign, or
    # one infinity and one finite number. Two infinities of opposite
    # sign would otherwise have an infinite relative tolerance.
    # Two infinities of the same sign are caught by the equality check
    # above.
    if math.isinf(a) or math.isinf(b):
        return False

    # now do the regular computation
    # this is essentially the "weak" test from the Boost library
    diff = math.fabs(b - a)
    result = (((diff <= math.fabs(rel_tol * b)) or
               (diff <= math.fabs(rel_tol * a))) or
              (diff <= abs_tol))
    return result