Hi I would like to dynamically adjust the displayed decimal places of a string representation of a floating point number, but i couldn't find any information on how to do it.
E.g:
precision = 8
n = 7.12345678911
str_n = '{0:.{precision}}'.format(n)
print(str_n) should display -> 7.12345678
But instead i'm getting a "KeyError". What am i missing?
You need to specify where precision in your format string comes from:
precision = 8
n = 7.12345678911
print('{0:.{precision}}'.format(n, precision=precision))
The first time, you specified which argument you'd like to be the number using an index ({0}), so the formatting function knows where to get the argument from, but when you specify a placeholder by some key, you have to explicitly specify that key.
It's a little unusual to mix these two systems, i'd recommend staying with one:
print('{number:.{precision}}'.format(number=n, precision=precision)) # most readable
print('{0:.{1}}'.format(n, precision))
print('{:.{}}'.format(n, precision)) # automatic indexing, least obvious
It is notable that these precision values will include the numbers before the point, so
>>> f"{123.45:.3}"
'1.23e+02'
will give drop drop the decimals and only give the first three digits of the number.
Instead, the f can be supplied to the type of the format (See the documentation) to get fixed-point formatting with precision decimal digits.
print('{number:.{precision}f}'.format(number=n, precision=precision)) # most readable
print('{0:.{1}f}'.format(n, precision))
print('{:.{}f}'.format(n, precision)) # automatic indexing, least obvious
f between the last two curly brackets, otherwise the string will be printed with default formatting.
print('{0:.{1}}'.format(n, precision)