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

[x * 0.1 for x in range(0, 10)] 

in Python 2.7x gives you the result of:

[0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.30000000000000004, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6000000000000001, 0.7000000000000001, 0.8, 0.9]

but if you use:

[ round(x * 0.1, 1) for x in range(0, 10)]

gives you the desired:

[0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9]

Answer 2

Suprised no-one has yet mentioned the recommended solution in the Python 3 docs:

See also:

• The linspace recipe shows how to implement a lazy version of range that suitable for floating point applications.

Once defined, the recipe is easy to use and does not require numpy or any other external libraries, but functions like numpy.linspace(). Note that rather than a step argument, the third num argument specifies the number of desired values, for example:

print(linspace(0, 10, 5))
# linspace(0, 10, 5)
print(list(linspace(0, 10, 5)))
# [0.0, 2.5, 5.0, 7.5, 10]

I quote a modified version of the full Python 3 recipe from Andrew Barnert below:

import collections.abc
import numbers

class linspace(collections.abc.Sequence):
    """linspace(start, stop, num) -> linspace object

    Return a virtual sequence of num numbers from start to stop (inclusive).

    If you need a half-open range, use linspace(start, stop, num+1)[:-1].
    """
    def __init__(self, start, stop, num):
        if not isinstance(num, numbers.Integral) or num <= 1:
            raise ValueError('num must be an integer > 1')
        self.start, self.stop, self.num = start, stop, num
        self.step = (stop-start)/(num-1)
    def __len__(self):
        return self.num
    def __getitem__(self, i):
        if isinstance(i, slice):
            return [self[x] for x in range(*i.indices(len(self)))]
        if i < 0:
            i = self.num + i
        if i >= self.num:
            raise IndexError('linspace object index out of range')
        if i == self.num-1:
            return self.stop
        return self.start + i*self.step
    def __repr__(self):
        return '{}({}, {}, {})'.format(type(self).__name__,
                                       self.start, self.stop, self.num)
    def __eq__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, linspace):
            return False
        return ((self.start, self.stop, self.num) ==
                (other.start, other.stop, other.num))
    def __ne__(self, other):
        return not self==other
    def __hash__(self):
        return hash((type(self), self.start, self.stop, self.num))

Answer 3

It can be done using Numpy library. arange() function allows steps in float. But, it returns a numpy array which can be converted to list using tolist() for our convenience.

for i in np.arange(0, 1, 0.1).tolist():
   print i

Answer 4

NumPy is a bit overkill, I think.

[p/10 for p in range(0, 10)]
[0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9]

Generally speaking, to do a step-by-1/x up to y you would do

x=100
y=2
[p/x for p in range(0, int(x*y))]
[0.0, 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, ..., 1.97, 1.98, 1.99]

(1/x produced less rounding noise when I tested).

Answer 5

Lots of the solutions here still had floating point errors in Python 3.6 and didnt do exactly what I personally needed.

Function below takes integers or floats, doesnt require imports and doesnt return floating point errors.

def frange(x, y, step):
    if int(x + y + step) == (x + y + step):
        r = list(range(int(x), int(y), int(step)))
    else:
        f = 10 ** (len(str(step)) - str(step).find('.') - 1)
        rf = list(range(int(x * f), int(y * f), int(step * f)))
        r = [i / f for i in rf]

    return r

Answer 6

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 <type: Decimal>')

    # 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')]