How to round each item in a list of floats to 2 decimal places?

You might want to look at Python's decimal module, which can make using floating point numbers and doing arithmetic with them a lot more intuitive. Here's a trivial example of one way of using it to "clean up" your list values:

>>> from decimal import *
>>> mylist = [0.30000000000000004, 0.5, 0.20000000000000001]
>>> getcontext().prec = 2
>>> ["%.2f" % e for e in mylist]
['0.30', '0.50', '0.20']
>>> [Decimal("%.2f" % e) for e in mylist]
[Decimal('0.30'), Decimal('0.50'), Decimal('0.20')]
>>> data = [float(Decimal("%.2f" % e)) for e in mylist]
>>> data
[0.3, 0.5, 0.2]

"%.2f" does not return a clean float. It returns a string representing this float with two decimals.

my_list = [0.30000000000000004, 0.5, 0.20000000000000001]
my_formatted_list = [ '%.2f' % elem for elem in my_list ]

returns:

['0.30', '0.50', '0.20']

Also, don't call your variable list. This is a reserved word for list creation. Use some other name, for example my_list.

If you want to obtain [0.30, 0.5, 0.20] (or at least the floats that are the closest possible), you can try this:

my_rounded_list = [ round(elem, 2) for elem in my_list ]

returns:

[0.29999999999999999, 0.5, 0.20000000000000001]

If you really want an iterator-free solution, you can use numpy and its array round function.

import numpy as np
myList = list(np.around(np.array(myList),2))

mylist = [0.30000000000000004, 0.5, 0.20000000000000001]
myRoundedList =  [round(x,2) for x in mylist] 
# [0.3, 0.5, 0.2]

Tags:

Python