Retain precision with double in Java

Question

public class doublePrecision {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        double total = 0;
        total += 5.6;
        total += 5.8;
        System.out.println(total);
    }
}

The above code prints:

11.399999999999

How would I get this to just print (or be able to use it as) 11.4?

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, you'll probably want to use the BigDecimal class, if you want to have an exact representation of 11.4.

Now, a little explanation into why this is happening:

The float and double primitive types in Java are floating point numbers, where the number is stored as a binary representation of a fraction and a exponent.

More specifically, a double-precision floating point value such as the double type is a 64-bit value, where:

• 1 bit denotes the sign (positive or negative).
• 11 bits for the exponent.
• 52 bits for the significant digits (the fractional part as a binary).

These parts are combined to produce a double representation of a value.

(Source: Wikipedia: Double precision)

For a detailed description of how floating point values are handled in Java, see the Section 4.2.3: Floating-Point Types, Formats, and Values of the Java Language Specification.

The byte, char, int, long types are fixed-point numbers, which are exact representions of numbers. Unlike fixed point numbers, floating point numbers will some times (safe to assume "most of the time") not be able to return an exact representation of a number. This is the reason why you end up with 11.399999999999 as the result of 5.6 + 5.8.

When requiring a value that is exact, such as 1.5 or 150.1005, you'll want to use one of the fixed-point types, which will be able to represent the number exactly.

As has been mentioned several times already, Java has a BigDecimal class which will handle very large numbers and very small numbers.

From the Java API Reference for the BigDecimal class:

Immutable, arbitrary-precision signed decimal numbers. A BigDecimal consists of an arbitrary precision integer unscaled value and a 32-bit integer scale. If zero or positive, the scale is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point. If negative, the unscaled value of the number is multiplied by ten to the power of the negation of the scale. The value of the number represented by the BigDecimal is therefore (unscaledValue × 10^-scale).

There has been many questions on Stack Overflow relating to the matter of floating point numbers and its precision. Here is a list of related questions that may be of interest:

• Why do I see a double variable initialized to some value like 21.4 as 21.399999618530273?
• How to print really big numbers in C++
• How is floating point stored? When does it matter?
• Use Float or Decimal for Accounting Application Dollar Amount?

If you really want to get down to the nitty gritty details of floating point numbers, take a look at What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Answer 2

When you input a double number, for example, 33.33333333333333, the value you get is actually the closest representable double-precision value, which is exactly:

33.3333333333333285963817615993320941925048828125

Dividing that by 100 gives:

0.333333333333333285963817615993320941925048828125

which also isn't representable as a double-precision number, so again it is rounded to the nearest representable value, which is exactly:

0.3333333333333332593184650249895639717578887939453125

When you print this value out, it gets rounded yet again to 17 decimal digits, giving:

0.33333333333333326

Answer 3

If you just want to process values as fractions, you can create a Fraction class which holds a numerator and denominator field.

Write methods for add, subtract, multiply and divide as well as a toDouble method. This way you can avoid floats during calculations.

EDIT: Quick implementation,

public class Fraction {

private int numerator;
private int denominator;

public Fraction(int n, int d){
    numerator = n;
    denominator = d;
}

public double toDouble(){
    return ((double)numerator)/((double)denominator);
}


public static Fraction add(Fraction a, Fraction b){
    if(a.denominator != b.denominator){
        double aTop = b.denominator * a.numerator;
        double bTop = a.denominator * b.numerator;
        return new Fraction(aTop + bTop, a.denominator * b.denominator);
    }
    else{
        return new Fraction(a.numerator + b.numerator, a.denominator);
    }
}

public static Fraction divide(Fraction a, Fraction b){
    return new Fraction(a.numerator * b.denominator, a.denominator * b.numerator);
}

public static Fraction multiply(Fraction a, Fraction b){
    return new Fraction(a.numerator * b.numerator, a.denominator * b.denominator);
}

public static Fraction subtract(Fraction a, Fraction b){
    if(a.denominator != b.denominator){
        double aTop = b.denominator * a.numerator;
        double bTop = a.denominator * b.numerator;
        return new Fraction(aTop-bTop, a.denominator*b.denominator);
    }
    else{
        return new Fraction(a.numerator - b.numerator, a.denominator);
    }
}

}

Answer 4

Observe that you'd have the same problem if you used limited-precision decimal arithmetic, and wanted to deal with 1/3: 0.333333333 * 3 is 0.999999999, not 1.00000000.

Unfortunately, 5.6, 5.8 and 11.4 just aren't round numbers in binary, because they involve fifths. So the float representation of them isn't exact, just as 0.3333 isn't exactly 1/3.

If all the numbers you use are non-recurring decimals, and you want exact results, use BigDecimal. Or as others have said, if your values are like money in the sense that they're all a multiple of 0.01, or 0.001, or something, then multiply everything by a fixed power of 10 and use int or long (addition and subtraction are trivial: watch out for multiplication).

However, if you are happy with binary for the calculation, but you just want to print things out in a slightly friendlier format, try java.util.Formatter or String.format. In the format string specify a precision less than the full precision of a double. To 10 significant figures, say, 11.399999999999 is 11.4, so the result will be almost as accurate and more human-readable in cases where the binary result is very close to a value requiring only a few decimal places.

The precision to specify depends a bit on how much maths you've done with your numbers - in general the more you do, the more error will accumulate, but some algorithms accumulate it much faster than others (they're called "unstable" as opposed to "stable" with respect to rounding errors). If all you're doing is adding a few values, then I'd guess that dropping just one decimal place of precision will sort things out. Experiment.

Answer 5

You may want to look into using java's java.math.BigDecimal class if you really need precision math. Here is a good article from Oracle/Sun on the case for BigDecimal. While you can never represent 1/3 as someone mentioned, you can have the power to decide exactly how precise you want the result to be. setScale() is your friend.. :)

Ok, because I have way too much time on my hands at the moment here is a code example that relates to your question:

import java.math.BigDecimal;
/**
 * Created by a wonderful programmer known as:
 * Vincent Stoessel
 * xaymaca@gmail.com
 * on Mar 17, 2010 at  11:05:16 PM
 */
public class BigUp {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        BigDecimal first, second, result ;
        first = new BigDecimal("33.33333333333333")  ;
        second = new BigDecimal("100") ;
        result = first.divide(second);
        System.out.println("result is " + result);
       //will print : result is 0.3333333333333333


    }
}

and to plug my new favorite language, Groovy, here is a neater example of the same thing:

import java.math.BigDecimal

def  first =   new BigDecimal("33.33333333333333")
def second = new BigDecimal("100")


println "result is " + first/second   // will print: result is 0.33333333333333

Answer 6

Pretty sure you could've made that into a three line example. :)

If you want exact precision, use BigDecimal. Otherwise, you can use ints multiplied by 10 ^ whatever precision you want.

Answer 7

As others have noted, not all decimal values can be represented as binary since decimal is based on powers of 10 and binary is based on powers of two.

If precision matters, use BigDecimal, but if you just want friendly output:

System.out.printf("%.2f\n", total);

Will give you:

11.40

Answer 8

You're running up against the precision limitation of type double.

Java.Math has some arbitrary-precision arithmetic facilities.

Answer 9

You can't, because 7.3 doesn't have a finite representation in binary. The closest you can get is 2054767329987789/2**48 = 7.3+1/1407374883553280.

Take a look at http://docs.python.org/tutorial/floatingpoint.html for a further explanation. (It's on the Python website, but Java and C++ have the same "problem".)

The solution depends on what exactly your problem is:

• If it's that you just don't like seeing all those noise digits, then fix your string formatting. Don't display more than 15 significant digits (or 7 for float).
• If it's that the inexactness of your numbers is breaking things like "if" statements, then you should write if (abs(x - 7.3) < TOLERANCE) instead of if (x == 7.3).
• If you're working with money, then what you probably really want is decimal fixed point. Store an integer number of cents or whatever the smallest unit of your currency is.
• (VERY UNLIKELY) If you need more than 53 significant bits (15-16 significant digits) of precision, then use a high-precision floating-point type, like BigDecimal.

Answer 10

private void getRound() {
    // this is very simple and interesting 
    double a = 5, b = 3, c;
    c = a / b;
    System.out.println(" round  val is " + c);

    //  round  val is  :  1.6666666666666667
    // if you want to only two precision point with double we 
            //  can use formate option in String 
           // which takes 2 parameters one is formte specifier which 
           // shows dicimal places another double value 
    String s = String.format("%.2f", c);
    double val = Double.parseDouble(s);
    System.out.println(" val is :" + val);
    // now out put will be : val is :1.67
}

Answer 11

Use java.math.BigDecimal

Doubles are binary fractions internally, so they sometimes cannot represent decimal fractions to the exact decimal.

Answer 12

Multiply everything by 100 and store it in a long as cents.

Answer 13

Computers store numbers in binary and can't actually represent numbers such as 33.333333333 or 100.0 exactly. This is one of the tricky things about using doubles. You will have to just round the answer before showing it to a user. Luckily in most applications, you don't need that many decimal places anyhow.

Answer 14

Floating point numbers differ from real numbers in that for any given floating point number there is a next higher floating point number. Same as integers. There's no integer between 1 and 2.

There's no way to represent 1/3 as a float. There's a float below it and there's a float above it, and there's a certain distance between them. And 1/3 is in that space.

Apfloat for Java claims to work with arbitrary precision floating point numbers, but I've never used it. Probably worth a look. http://www.apfloat.org/apfloat_java/

A similar question was asked here before Java floating point high precision library

Answer 15

Doubles are approximations of the decimal numbers in your Java source. You're seeing the consequence of the mismatch between the double (which is a binary-coded value) and your source (which is decimal-coded).

Java's producing the closest binary approximation. You can use the java.text.DecimalFormat to display a better-looking decimal value.

Answer 16

Use a BigDecimal. It even lets you specify rounding rules (like ROUND_HALF_EVEN, which will minimize statistical error by rounding to the even neighbor if both are the same distance; i.e. both 1.5 and 2.5 round to 2).

Answer 17

Check out BigDecimal, it handles problems dealing with floating point arithmetic like that.

The new call would look like this:

term[number].coefficient.add(co);

Use setScale() to set the number of decimal place precision to be used.

Answer 18

Why not use the round() method from Math class?

// The number of 0s determines how many digits you want after the floating point
// (here one digit)
total = (double)Math.round(total * 10) / 10;
System.out.println(total); // prints 11.4

Answer 19

If you have no choice other than using double values, can use the below code.

public static double sumDouble(double value1, double value2) {
    double sum = 0.0;
    String value1Str = Double.toString(value1);
    int decimalIndex = value1Str.indexOf(".");
    int value1Precision = 0;
    if (decimalIndex != -1) {
        value1Precision = (value1Str.length() - 1) - decimalIndex;
    }

    String value2Str = Double.toString(value2);
    decimalIndex = value2Str.indexOf(".");
    int value2Precision = 0;
    if (decimalIndex != -1) {
        value2Precision = (value2Str.length() - 1) - decimalIndex;
    }

    int maxPrecision = value1Precision > value2Precision ? value1Precision : value2Precision;
    sum = value1 + value2;
    String s = String.format("%." + maxPrecision + "f", sum);
    sum = Double.parseDouble(s);
    return sum;
}

Answer 20

Do not waste your efford using BigDecimal. In 99.99999% cases you don't need it. java double type is of cource approximate but in almost all cases, it is sufficiently precise. Mind that your have an error at 14th significant digit. This is really negligible!

To get nice output use:

System.out.printf("%.2f\n", total);