Round to "beautiful" value - iphone

Question

guys, I'm making simple graph drawer and want to find beautiful values for horizontal lines.
For example, if I have value equals to 72089.601562, beautiful is 70000, or 75000. So, I think that beautifulNumber%5 = 0.
Have you any ideas?

Answer 1

How about this?
#import <math.h>
#import <stdio.h>
#define ROUNDING 5000
int beautify(float input)
{
// Cast to int, losing the decimal value.
int value = (int)input;
value = (value / ROUNDING) * ROUNDING;
if ((int)input % ROUNDING > ROUNDING / 2 )
{
value += ROUNDING;
}
return value;
}
int main()
{
printf("%d\n", beautify(70000.601562)); // 70000
printf("%d\n", beautify(72089.601562)); // 70000
printf("%d\n", beautify(76089.601562)); // 75000
printf("%d\n", beautify(79089.601562)); // 80000
printf("%d\n", beautify(70000.601562)); // 70000
return 0;
}

Answer 2

It depends whether you want a floor value, a ceiling value or just to round to the nearest 5000.
For a floor value:
int beautiful = (int)(floor(ugly / 5000.0) * 5000.0);
For a ceiling value:
int beautiful = (int)(ceil(ugly / 5000.0) * 5000.0);
For rounding:
int beautiful = (int)(round(ugly / 5000.0) * 5000.0);
For making graph lines, I'd probably find the minimum and maximum values you have to graph, start with a floor value for the minimum value and then add your desired interval until you have surpassed your maximum value.
For instance:
float minValue = 2.34;
float maxValue = 7.72;
int interval = 1;
NSMutableArray *horizLines = [NSMutableArray array];
int line = (int)(floor(minValue / interval) * interval);
[horizLines addObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:line]];
do {
line = (int)(ceil(minValue / interval) * interval);
[horizLines addObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:line]];
if (minValue >= maxValue) break;
minValue = minValue + interval;
}
Use as needed!

Answer 3

Well, it seems like you'd want it to scale based on the size of the number. If the range only goes to 10, then obviously rounding to the nearest 5,000 doesn't make sense. There's probably a really elegant way to code it using bit shifting but just something like this will do the trick:
float value = 72089.601562
int beautiful = 0;
// EDIT to support returning a float for small numbers:
if (value < 0.2) beautiful = int(value*100)/100.;
else if (value < 2.) beautiful = int(value*10)/10.;
// Anything bigger is easy:
else if (value < 20) beautiful = (int)value;
else if (value < 200) beautiful = (int)value/10;
else if (value < 2000) beautiful = (int)value/100;
else if (value < 20000) beautiful = (int)value/1000;
// etc

Answer 4

Sounds like what you want to do is round to 1 or perhaps 2 significant digits. Rounding to n significant digits is pretty easy:
double roundToNDigits(double x, int n) {
double basis = pow(10.0, floor(log10(x)) - (n-1));
return basis * round(x / basis);
}
This will give you roundToNDigits(74518.7, 1) == 70000.0 and roundToNDigits(7628.54, 1) == 8000.00
If you want to round to 1 or 2 digits (only 2 where the second digit is 5), you want something like:
double roundSpecial(double x) {
double basis = pow(10.0, floor(log10(x))) / 2.0;
return basis * round(x / basis);
}