Change default float print format

Question

I\'ve some lists and more complex structures containing floats. When printing them, I see the floats with a lot of decimal digits, but when printing, I don\'t need all of th

Answer 1

I ran into this issue today, and I came up with a different solution. If you're worried about what it looks like when printed, you can replace the stdout file object with a custom one that, when write() is called, searches for any things that look like floats, and replaces them with your own format for them.

class ProcessedFile(object):

    def __init__(self, parent, func):
        """Wraps 'parent', which should be a file-like object,
        so that calls to our write transforms the passed-in
        string with func, and then writes it with the parent."""
        self.parent = parent
        self.func = func

    def write(self, str):
        """Applies self.func to the passed in string and calls
        the parent to write the result."""
        return self.parent.write(self.func(str))

    def writelines(self, text):
        """Just calls the write() method multiple times."""
        for s in sequence_of_strings:
            self.write(s)

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        """Default to the parent for any other methods."""
        return getattr(self.parent, key)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import re
    import sys

    #Define a function that recognises float-like strings, converts them
    #to floats, and then replaces them with 1.2e formatted strings.
    pattern = re.compile(r"\b\d+\.\d*\b")
    def reformat_float(input):
        return re.subn(pattern, lambda match: ("{:1.2e}".format(float(match.group()))), input)[0]

    #Use this function with the above class to transform sys.stdout.
    #You could write a context manager for this.
    sys.stdout = ProcessedFile(sys.stdout, reformat_float)
    print -1.23456
    # -1.23e+00
    print [1.23456] * 6
    # [1.23e+00, 1.23e+00, 1.23e+00, 1.23e+00, 1.23e+00, 1.23e+00]
    print "The speed of light is  299792458.0 m/s."
    # The speed of light is  3.00e+08 m/s.
    sys.stdout = sys.stdout.parent
    print "Back to our normal formatting: 1.23456"
    # Back to our normal formatting: 1.23456

It's no good if you're just putting numbers into a string, but eventually you'll probably want to write that string to some sort of file somewhere, and you may be able to wrap that file with the above object. Obviously there's a bit of a performance overhead.

Fair warning: I haven't tested this in Python 3, I have no idea if it would work.