How to format a floating number to fixed width in Python

How do I format a floating number to a fixed width with the following requirements:

1. Leading zero if n < 1
2. Add trailing decimal zero(s) to fill up fixed width
3. Truncate decimal digits past fixed width
4. Align all decimal points

For example:

% formatter something like '{:06}' numbers = [23.23, 0.123334987, 1, 4.223, 9887.2] for number in numbers: print formatter.format(number) 

The output would be like

 23.2300 0.1233 1.0000 4.2230 9887.2000 

10 Answers

numbers = [23.23, 0.1233, 1.0, 4.223, 9887.2] for x in numbers: print("{:10.4f}".format(x)) 

prints

 23.2300 0.1233 1.0000 4.2230 9887.2000 

The format specifier inside the curly braces follows the Python format string syntax. Specifically, in this case, it consists of the following parts:

• The empty string before the colon means "take the next provided argument to format()" – in this case the x as the only argument.
• The 10.4f part after the colon is the format specification.
• The f denotes fixed-point notation.
• The 10 is the total width of the field being printed, lefted-padded by spaces.
• The 4 is the number of digits after the decimal point.

It has been a few years since this was answered, but as of Python 3.6 (PEP498) you could use the new f-strings:

numbers = [23.23, 0.123334987, 1, 4.223, 9887.2] for number in numbers: print(f'{number:9.4f}') 

Prints:

 23.2300 0.1233 1.0000 4.2230 9887.2000 

In python3 the following works:

>>> v=10.4 >>> print('% 6.2f' % v) 10.40 >>> print('% 12.1f' % v) 10.4 >>> print('%012.1f' % v) 0000000010.4 

See Python 3.x format string syntax:

IDLE 3.5.1 numbers = ['23.23', '.1233', '1', '4.223', '9887.2'] for x in numbers: print('{0: >#016.4f}'. format(float(x))) 23.2300 0.1233 1.0000 4.2230 9887.2000 

You can also left pad with zeros. For example if you want number to have 9 characters length, left padded with zeros use:

print('{:09.3f}'.format(number))

Thus, if number = 4.656, the output is: 00004.656

For your example the output will look like this:

numbers = [23.2300, 0.1233, 1.0000, 4.2230, 9887.2000] for x in numbers: print('{:010.4f}'.format(x)) 

prints:

00023.2300 00000.1233 00001.0000 00004.2230 09887.2000 

One example where this may be useful is when you want to properly list filenames in alphabetical order. I noticed in some linux systems, the number is: 1,10,11,..2,20,21,...

Thus if you want to enforce the necessary numeric order in filenames, you need to left pad with the appropriate number of zeros.

This will print 76.66:

print("Number: ", f"{76.663254: .2f}") 

In Python 3.

GPA = 2.5 print(" %6.1f " % GPA) 

6.1f means after the dots 1 digits show if you print 2 digits after the dots you should only %6.2f such that %6.3f 3 digits print after the point.

I needed something similar for arrays. That helped me

some_array_rounded=np.around(some_array, 5) 

Using f-string literals:

>>> number = 12.34 >>> print(f"{number}") 12.34 >>> print(f"{number:10f}") 12.340000 >>> print(f"{number:10.4f}") 12.3400 

The 10.4f after the colon : is the format specification, with 10 being the width in characters of the whole number, and the second number 4 being the number of decimal places, and the f standing for floating-point number.

It's also possible to use variables instead of hard-coding the width and the number of decimal places:

>>> number = 12.34 >>> width = 10 >>> decimals = 4 >>> print(f"{number:{width}.{decimals}f}") 12.3400 

I tried all the options like

1. pd.options.display.float_format = '{:.4f}'.format
2. pd.set_option('display.float_format', str)
3. pd.set_option('display.float_format', lambda x: f'%.{len(str(x%1))-2}f' % x)
4. pd.set_option('display.float_format', lambda x: '%.3f' % x)

but nothing worked for me.

so while assigning the variable/value (var1) to a variable (say num1) I used round(val,5) like

num1 = round(var1,5) 

This is a crude method as you have to use this round function in each assignment. But this ensures you control on how it happens and get what you want.