Formatting floats without trailing zeros

Question

How can I format a float so that it doesn\'t contain trailing zeros? In other words, I want the resulting string to be as short as possible.

For example:

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Answer 1

You could use %g to achieve this:

'%g'%(3.140)

or, for Python 2.6 or better:

'{0:g}'.format(3.140)

From the docs for format: g causes (among other things)

insignificant trailing zeros [to be] removed from the significand, and the decimal point is also removed if there are no remaining digits following it.