Can I reduce the precision of a float number? In all the searching I've been doing I saw only how to reduce the precision for printing the number. I do not need to print it. I want, for example, to convert 13.2836 to 13.28. Without even rounding it.
Is it possible?
The suggested answer from the system is not what I am looking for. It also deals with printing the value and I want to have a float.
There isn't really a way to do it, with good reason. While john16384's answer alludes to this, his answer doesn't make the problem clear... so probably you'll try it, it won't do what you want, and perhaps you still won't know why...
The problem is that while we think in decimal and expect that the decimal point is controlled by a power-of-10 exponent, typical floating point implementations (including Java float) use a power-of-2 exponent. Why does it matter?
You know that to represent 1/3 in decimal you'd say 0.3(repeating) - so if you have a limited number of decimal digits, you can't really represent 1/3. When the exponent is 2 instead of 10, you can't really represent 1/5 either, or a lot of other numbers that you could represent exactly in decimal.
As it happens .28 is one of those numbers. So you could multiply by 100, pass the result to floor, and divide by 100, but when this gets converted back to a float, the resulting value will be a little different from .28 and so, if you then check its value, you'll still see more than 2 decimal places.
The solution would be to use something like BigDecimal that can exactly represent decimal values of a given precision.
The standard warnings about doing precision arithmetic with floats applies, but you can do this:
float f = 13.2836;
f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;
if you need to save memory in some part of your calculation, And your numbers are smaller than 2^15/100 (range short), you can do the following.
Part of this taken from this post https://stackoverflow.com/a/25201407/7256243.
float number = 1.2345667f;
number= (short)(100*number);
number=(float)(number/100);
You only need to rememeber that the short's are 100 times larger.
Most answers went straight to how do represent floats more accurately, which is strange because you're asking:
Can I reduce the precision of a float number
Which is the exact opposite. So I'll try to answer this.
However there are several way to "reduce precision":
I'll tackle those separately.
Just to get it out of the way: simply because you're dropping precision off of your calculations on a float, doesn't mean it'll be any faster. Quite the contrary. This answer by @john16384:
f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;
Only adds up computation time. If you know the number of significant digits from the result is low, don't bother removing them, just carry that information with the number:
public class Number WithSignificantDigits {
private float value;
private int significantdigits;
(implement basic operations here, but don't floor/round anywhere)
}
If you're doing this because you're worried about performance: stop it now, just use the full precision. If not, read on.
To actually store a number with less precision, you need to move away from float.
One such representation is using an int with a fixed point convention (i.e. the last 2 digits are past the coma).
If you're trying to save on storage space, do this. If not, read on.
To keep using float, but drop its precision, several options exist:
@john16384 proposed:
`f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;`
Or even
f = ((int) (f*100)) / 100.;
If the answer is this, your question is a duplicate. If not, read on.
Since you just want to lose precision, but haven't stated how much, you could do with bitwise shifts:
float v = 0;
int bits = Float.floatToIntBits(v);
bits = bits >> 7; // Precision lost here
float truncated = Float.intBitsToFloat(bits);
Use 7 bitshifts to reduce precision to nearest 1/128th (close enough to 1/100)
Use 10 bitshifts to reduce precision to nearest 1/1024th (close enough to 1/1000)
I haven't tested performance of those, but If your read this, you did not care.
If you want to lose precision, and you don't care about formatting (numbers may stil have a large number of digits after the coma, like 0,9765625 instead of 1), do this. If you care about formatting and want a limited number of digits after the coma, read on.
For this you can:
BigDecimals, orString (yuk)Because floats or doubles won't let you do this in most cases.
