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

This maybe is a bit ugly hack, but it works pretty well when you don't need more than the default float precision (about 11 decimals).

The round_to function uses the format method from the built-in str class to round up the float to a string that represents the float with the number of decimals needed, and then applies the eval built-in function to the rounded float string to get back to the float numeric type.

The is_close function just applies a simple conditional to the rounded up float.

def round_to(float_num, prec):
    return eval("'{:." + str(int(prec)) + "f}'.format(" + str(float_num) + ")")

def is_close(float_a, float_b, prec):
    if round_to(float_a, prec) == round_to(float_b, prec):
        return True
    return False

>>>a = 10.0
10.0
>>>b = 10.0001
10.0001
>>>print is_close(a, b, prec=3)
True
>>>print is_close(a, b, prec=4)
False

Update:

As suggested by @stepehjfox, a cleaner way to build a rount_to function avoiding "eval" is using nested formatting:

def round_to(float_num, prec):
    return '{:.{precision}f}'.format(float_num, precision=prec)

Following the same idea, the code can be even simpler using the great new f-strings (Python 3.6+):

def round_to(float_num, prec):
    return f'{float_num:.{prec}f}'

So, we could even wrap it up all in one simple and clean 'is_close' function:

def is_close(a, b, prec):
    return f'{a:.{prec}f}' == f'{b:.{prec}f}'