How to suppress scientific notation when printing float values?

Question

Here\'s my code:

x = 1.0
y = 100000.0    
print x/y

My quotient displays as 1.00000e-05.

Is there any way to suppress

Answer 1

This is using Captain Cucumber's answer, but with 2 additions.

1) allowing the function to get non scientific notation numbers and just return them as is (so you can throw a lot of input that some of the numbers are 0.00003123 vs 3.123e-05 and still have function work.

2) added support for negative numbers. (in original function, a negative number would end up like 0.0000-108904 from -1.08904e-05)

def getExpandedScientificNotation(flt):
    was_neg = False
    if not ("e" in flt):
        return flt
    if flt.startswith('-'):
        flt = flt[1:]
        was_neg = True 
    str_vals = str(flt).split('e')
    coef = float(str_vals[0])
    exp = int(str_vals[1])
    return_val = ''
    if int(exp) > 0:
        return_val += str(coef).replace('.', '')
        return_val += ''.join(['0' for _ in range(0, abs(exp - len(str(coef).split('.')[1])))])
    elif int(exp) < 0:
        return_val += '0.'
        return_val += ''.join(['0' for _ in range(0, abs(exp) - 1)])
        return_val += str(coef).replace('.', '')
    if was_neg:
        return_val='-'+return_val
    return return_val

Answer 2

With newer versions of Python (2.6 and later), you can use ''.format() to accomplish what @SilentGhost suggested:

'{0:f}'.format(x/y)

Answer 3

If it is a string then use the built in float on it to do the conversion for instance: print( "%.5f" % float("1.43572e-03")) answer:0.00143572

Answer 4

In addition to SG's answer, you can also use the Decimal module:

from decimal import Decimal
x = str(Decimal(1) / Decimal(10000))

# x is a string '0.0001'

Answer 5

Using the newer version ''.format (also remember to specify how many digit after the . you wish to display, this depends on how small is the floating number). See this example:

>>> a = -7.1855143557448603e-17
>>> '{:f}'.format(a)
'-0.000000'

as shown above, default is 6 digits! This is not helpful for our case example, so instead we could use something like this:

>>> '{:.20f}'.format(a)
'-0.00000000000000007186'

Update

Starting in Python 3.6, this can be simplified with the new formatted string literal, as follows:

>>> f'{a:.20f}'
'-0.00000000000000007186'

Answer 6

Using 3.6.4, I was having a similar problem that randomly, a number in the output file would be formatted with scientific notation when using this:

fout.write('someFloats: {0:0.8},{1:0.8},{2:0.8}'.format(someFloat[0], someFloat[1], someFloat[2]))

All that I had to do to fix it was to add 'f':

fout.write('someFloats: {0:0.8f},{1:0.8f},{2:0.8f}'.format(someFloat[0], someFloat[1], someFloat[2]))