How to change the number of decimal digits?
Changing the format Matlab can show only 4 (if short) or 15 (if long). But I want exactly 3 digits to show.
To elaborate on Hamataro's answer, you could also use roundn function to round to a specific decimal precision, e.g.: roundn(1.23456789,-3) will yield 1.235. However, Matlab will still display the result in either of the formats you have mentioned, i.e 1.2350 if format is set to short, and 1.235000000000000 if format is set for long.
Alternatively, if you use sprintf, you can use the %g formatting option to display only a set number of digits, regardless of where the decimal point is. sprintf('%0.3g',1.23456789) yields 1.23; sprintf('%0.3g',12.3456789) yields 12.3
You can either use sprintf or do *
var2 = round(var1*1000)/1000
Related
Let's say I create some number A, of the order 10^4:
A = 81472.368639;
disp(A)
8.1472e+04
That wasn't what I wanted. Where are my decimals? There should be six decimals more. Checking the variable editor shows me this:
Again, I lost my decimals. How do I keep these for further calculations?
Scientific notation, or why you didn't lose any decimals
You didn't lose any decimals, this is just MATLAB's way of displaying large numbers. MATLAB rounds the display of numbers, both in the command window and in the variable editor, to one digit before the dot and four after that, using scientific notation. Scientific notation is the Xe+y notation, where X is some number, and y an integer. This means X times 10 to the power of y, which can be visualised as "shift the dot to the right for y places" (or to the left if y is negative).
Force MATLAB to show you all your decimals
Now that we know what MATLAB does, can we force it to show us our number? Of course, there're several options for that, the easiest is setting a longer format. The most used for displaying long numbers are format long and format longG, whose difference is apparent when we use them:
format long
A
A =
8.1472368639e+04
format longG
A
A =
81472.368639
format long displays all decimals (up to 16 total) using scientific notation, format longG tries to display numbers without scientific notation but with most available decimals, again: as many as there are or up to 16 digits, both before and after the dot, in total.
A more fancy solution is using disp(sprintf()) or fprintf if you want an exact number of decimals before the dot, after the dot, or both:
fprintf('A = %5.3f\n',A) % \n is just to force a line break
A = 81472.369
disp(sprintf('A = %5.2f\n',A))
A = 81472.37
Finally, remember the variable editor? How do we get that to show our variable completely? Simple: click on the cell containing the number:
So, in short: we didn't lose any decimals along the way, MATLAB still stores them internally, it just displays less decimals by default.
Other uses of format
format has another nice property in that you can set format compact, which gets rid of all the additional empty lines which MATLAB normally adds in the command window:
format compact
format long
A
A =
8.147236863931789e+04
format longG
A
A =
81472.3686393179
which in my opinion is very handy when you don't want to make your command window very big, but don't want to scroll a lot either.
format shortG and format longG are useful when your array has very different numbers in them:
b = 10.^(-3:3);
A.*b
ans =
1.0e+07 *
0.0000 0.0001 0.0008 0.0081 0.0815 0.8147 8.1472
format longG
A.*b
ans =
Columns 1 through 3
81.472368639 814.72368639 8147.2368639
Columns 4 through 6
81472.368639 814723.68639 8147236.8639
Column 7
81472368.639
format shortG
A.*b
ans =
81.472 814.72 8147.2 81472 8.1472e+05 8.1472e+06 8.1472e+07
i.e. they work like long and short on single numbers, but chooses the most convenient display format for each of the numbers.
There's a few more exotic options, like shortE, shortEng, hex etc, but those you can find well documented in The MathWork's own documentation on format.
I want to receive the string representation of a number, 2 points after the dot.
I'm using MATLAB R2015a, and noticed that num2str function returns inconsistent results:
for 0.511 I get the required result (0.51):
num2str(0.511,2)
ans =
0.51
for 1.711 I get 1.7 instead of 1.71:
num2str(1.511,2)
ans =
1.5
Anyone knows why?
the 'precision' scalar input to num2str is the number of significant digits. if you want to have 2 figures after the decimal point use the 'formatSpec' string argument:
num2str(0.511,'%.2f')
0.51
num2str(1.511,'%.2f')
1.51
From the documentation for num2str():
s = num2str(A,precision) returns a character array that represents the numbers with the maximum number of significant digits specified by precision.
In other words, the second parameter controls the total number of significant figures, not the number of decimal places.
If you want to round to two decimal places, then use the round() function. You can try rounding the number before calling num2str():
num2str(round(1.511,2))
i have code and use double function several time to convert sym to double.to increase precision , I want to use digits function.
I want to know it is enough that I write digits in the top of code or I must write digits in above of every double function.
digits set's the precision until it is changed again. Calling digits() without any input you get the precision to verify it's set correct.
In many cases digis has absoluetly no influence on symbolic variables because an analytical solution is found. This means there are no precision errors unless you convert to double. When convertig, digits should be set to at least 16 because this matches double precision.
I need to generate a random number that is between .0000001 and 1, I have been using rand(1) but this only gives me 4 decimal points, is there any other way to do this generation?
Thanks!
From the Octave docs:
By default, Octave displays 5 significant digits in a human readable form (option ‘short’ paired with ‘loose’ format for matrices).
So it's probably an issue with the way you're printing the value rather than the value itself.
That same page shows the other output formats in addition to short, the one you may want to look in to is long, giving 15 significant digits.
And there is also the output_precision which can be set as per here:
old_val = output_precision (7)
disp (whatever)
old_val = output_precision (old_val)
Set the output_precision to 7 and it should be ok :)
Setting the output precision won't help though because the number can still be less than .0000001 in theory but you will only be displaying the first 7 digits. The simplest way is:
req=0;
while (req<.0000001)
req=rand(1);
end
It is possible that this could get you stuck in a loop but it will produce the right number. To display all the decimals you can also use the following command:
format long
This will show you 15 decimal places. To switch back go:
formay short
For example I have a value of 103.33 I want to put 100 to one variable and 33 to another variable. How can I do this?
Thanks.
Create two formula fields, eg wholepart and decimalpart.
The formula for wholepart is trunc({yourfieldnamehere}) and the formula for decimalpart is {yourfieldnamehere} - trunc({yourfieldnamehere})
The value you get in decimalpart is going to be the decimal fraction; if you know it's always going to be a 2 digit decimal, multiply by 100. If it's variable, you could do a quick string conversion, count the digits and multiply by the appropriate power of 10.
Hampk
Use trunc to get Integer portion and then subtract to get decimal portion. Convert decimal portion to text by ToText and then take Split function to get after "." from decimal portion
or
Use ToText and use Split function to get after and before "."
You can also use the 'Remainder' function to find the number after the decimal point. For example, REMAINDER ({FIELD NAME},1) should give you 0.33