Decimal to Fraction conversion in Swift
So a little late here, but I had a similar problem and ended up building Swift FractionFormatter. This works because most of the irrational numbers you care about are part of the set of vulgar, or common fractions and are easy to validate proper transformation. The rest may or may not round, but you get very close on any reasonable fraction your user might generate. It is designed to be a drop in replacement for NumberFormatter.
If you want to display the results of calculations as rational numbers
then the only 100% correct solution is to use rational arithmetic throughout all calculations, i.e. all intermediate values are stored as a pair of integers (numerator, denominator)
, and all additions, multiplications, divisions, etc are done using the rules for rational
numbers.
As soon as a result is assigned to a binary floating point number
such as Double
, information is lost. For example,
let x : Double = 7/10
stores in x
an approximation of 0.7
, because that number cannot
be represented exactly as a Double
. From
print(String(format:"%a", x)) // 0x1.6666666666666p-1
one can see that x
holds the value
0x16666666666666 * 2^(-53) = 6305039478318694 / 9007199254740992
≈ 0.69999999999999995559107901499373838305
So a correct representation of x
as a rational number would be
6305039478318694 / 9007199254740992
, but that is of course not what
you expect. What you expect is 7/10
, but there is another problem:
let x : Double = 69999999999999996/100000000000000000
assigns exactly the same value to x
, it is indistinguishable from
0.7
within the precision of a Double
.
So should x
be displayed as 7/10
or as 69999999999999996/100000000000000000
?
As said above, using rational arithmetic would be the perfect solution.
If that is not viable, then you can convert the Double
back to
a rational number with a given precision.
(The following is taken from Algorithm for LCM of doubles in Swift.)
Continued Fractions are an efficient method to create a (finite or infinite) sequence of fractions hn/kn that are arbitrary good approximations to a given real number x, and here is a possible implementation in Swift:
typealias Rational = (num : Int, den : Int)
func rationalApproximationOf(x0 : Double, withPrecision eps : Double = 1.0E-6) -> Rational {
var x = x0
var a = floor(x)
var (h1, k1, h, k) = (1, 0, Int(a), 1)
while x - a > eps * Double(k) * Double(k) {
x = 1.0/(x - a)
a = floor(x)
(h1, k1, h, k) = (h, k, h1 + Int(a) * h, k1 + Int(a) * k)
}
return (h, k)
}
Examples:
rationalApproximationOf(0.333333) // (1, 3)
rationalApproximationOf(0.25) // (1, 4)
rationalApproximationOf(0.1764705882) // (3, 17)
The default precision is 1.0E-6, but you can adjust that to your needs:
rationalApproximationOf(0.142857) // (1, 7)
rationalApproximationOf(0.142857, withPrecision: 1.0E-10) // (142857, 1000000)
rationalApproximationOf(M_PI) // (355, 113)
rationalApproximationOf(M_PI, withPrecision: 1.0E-7) // (103993, 33102)
rationalApproximationOf(M_PI, withPrecision: 1.0E-10) // (312689, 99532)
Swift 3 version:
typealias Rational = (num : Int, den : Int)
func rationalApproximation(of x0 : Double, withPrecision eps : Double = 1.0E-6) -> Rational {
var x = x0
var a = x.rounded(.down)
var (h1, k1, h, k) = (1, 0, Int(a), 1)
while x - a > eps * Double(k) * Double(k) {
x = 1.0/(x - a)
a = x.rounded(.down)
(h1, k1, h, k) = (h, k, h1 + Int(a) * h, k1 + Int(a) * k)
}
return (h, k)
}
Examples:
rationalApproximation(of: 0.333333) // (1, 3)
rationalApproximation(of: 0.142857, withPrecision: 1.0E-10) // (142857, 1000000)
Or – as suggested by @brandonscript – with a struct Rational
and an initializer:
struct Rational {
let numerator : Int
let denominator: Int
init(numerator: Int, denominator: Int) {
self.numerator = numerator
self.denominator = denominator
}
init(approximating x0: Double, withPrecision eps: Double = 1.0E-6) {
var x = x0
var a = x.rounded(.down)
var (h1, k1, h, k) = (1, 0, Int(a), 1)
while x - a > eps * Double(k) * Double(k) {
x = 1.0/(x - a)
a = x.rounded(.down)
(h1, k1, h, k) = (h, k, h1 + Int(a) * h, k1 + Int(a) * k)
}
self.init(numerator: h, denominator: k)
}
}
Example usage:
print(Rational(approximating: 0.333333))
// Rational(numerator: 1, denominator: 3)
print(Rational(approximating: .pi, withPrecision: 1.0E-7))
// Rational(numerator: 103993, denominator: 33102)