Re: DecimalField Problem

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 16:47:52 UTC, Erik Cederstrand wrote:

Den 08/01/2014 kl. 17.11 skrev Timothy W. Cook <t...@mlhim.org>:

> But one would think that if Django calls it a decimal field, it would convert the float to decimal.
> I suppose I'll do that before writing it out to the file (an XML schema) so it really isn't a big deal, just surprising.

Ah, the "decimal" in DecimalField only refers to how you are supposed to enter the values in a form. Python itself only has float and that's what Django uses internally. Decimal vs. scientific notation is just a matter of how you choose to format the output when converting the float to a string. The default in Python depends on the value:

>>> str(0.1)
'0.1'
>>> str(0.00001)
'1e-05'

No, no, no. None of this is true.

Decimals are not a differently-formatted version of floats. Decimals are not a built-in datatype in Python, it's true, but they are provided in the standard library in (not surprisingly) the `decimal` module. As the documentation for that module explains, decimals do provide precise floating-point arithmetic, and are therefore suitable for representing things like currencies. Databases usually also provide a similar datatype, which Django's DecimalField maps to.

--

DR.

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