How to use a decimal range() step value?

Question

Is there a way to step between 0 and 1 by 0.1?

I thought I could do it like the following, but it failed:

for i in range(0, 1, 0.1):
    print i
         


        

Answer 1

To counter the float precision issues, you could use the Decimal module.

This demands an extra effort of converting to Decimal from int or float while writing the code, but you can instead pass str and modify the function if that sort of convenience is indeed necessary.

from decimal import Decimal


def decimal_range(*args):

    zero, one = Decimal('0'), Decimal('1')

    if len(args) == 1:
        start, stop, step = zero, args[0], one
    elif len(args) == 2:
        start, stop, step = args + (one,)
    elif len(args) == 3:
        start, stop, step = args
    else:
        raise ValueError('Expected 1 or 2 arguments, got %s' % len(args))

    if not all([type(arg) == Decimal for arg in (start, stop, step)]):
        raise ValueError('Arguments must be passed as ')

    # neglect bad cases
    if (start == stop) or (start > stop and step >= zero) or \
                          (start < stop and step <= zero):
        return []

    current = start
    while abs(current) < abs(stop):
        yield current
        current += step

Sample outputs -

from decimal import Decimal as D

list(decimal_range(D('2')))
# [Decimal('0'), Decimal('1')]
list(decimal_range(D('2'), D('4.5')))
# [Decimal('2'), Decimal('3'), Decimal('4')]
list(decimal_range(D('2'), D('4.5'), D('0.5')))
# [Decimal('2'), Decimal('2.5'), Decimal('3.0'), Decimal('3.5'), Decimal('4.0')]
list(decimal_range(D('2'), D('4.5'), D('-0.5')))
# []
list(decimal_range(D('2'), D('-4.5'), D('-0.5')))
# [Decimal('2'),
#  Decimal('1.5'),
#  Decimal('1.0'),
#  Decimal('0.5'),
#  Decimal('0.0'),
#  Decimal('-0.5'),
#  Decimal('-1.0'),
#  Decimal('-1.5'),
#  Decimal('-2.0'),
#  Decimal('-2.5'),
#  Decimal('-3.0'),
#  Decimal('-3.5'),
#  Decimal('-4.0')]