Formatting doubles for output in C#

The problem is that .NET will always round a double to 15 significant decimal digits before applying your formatting, regardless of the precision requested by your format and regardless of the exact decimal value of the binary number.

I'd guess that the Visual Studio debugger has its own format/display routines that directly access the internal binary number, hence the discrepancies between your C# code, your C code and the debugger.

There's nothing built-in that will allow you to access the exact decimal value of a double, or to enable you to format a double to a specific number of decimal places, but you could do this yourself by picking apart the internal binary number and rebuilding it as a string representation of the decimal value.

Alternatively, you could use Jon Skeet's DoubleConverter class (linked to from his "Binary floating point and .NET" article). This has a ToExactString method which returns the exact decimal value of a double. You could easily modify this to enable rounding of the output to a specific precision.

double i = 10 * 0.69;
Console.WriteLine(DoubleConverter.ToExactString(i));
Console.WriteLine(DoubleConverter.ToExactString(6.9 - i));
Console.WriteLine(DoubleConverter.ToExactString(6.9));

// 6.89999999999999946709294817992486059665679931640625
// 0.00000000000000088817841970012523233890533447265625
// 6.9000000000000003552713678800500929355621337890625

Digits after decimal point
// just two decimal places
String.Format("{0:0.00}", 123.4567);      // "123.46"
String.Format("{0:0.00}", 123.4);         // "123.40"
String.Format("{0:0.00}", 123.0);         // "123.00"

// max. two decimal places
String.Format("{0:0.##}", 123.4567);      // "123.46"
String.Format("{0:0.##}", 123.4);         // "123.4"
String.Format("{0:0.##}", 123.0);         // "123"
// at least two digits before decimal point
String.Format("{0:00.0}", 123.4567);      // "123.5"
String.Format("{0:00.0}", 23.4567);       // "23.5"
String.Format("{0:00.0}", 3.4567);        // "03.5"
String.Format("{0:00.0}", -3.4567);       // "-03.5"

Thousands separator
String.Format("{0:0,0.0}", 12345.67);     // "12,345.7"
String.Format("{0:0,0}", 12345.67);       // "12,346"

Zero
Following code shows how can be formatted a zero (of double type).

String.Format("{0:0.0}", 0.0);            // "0.0"
String.Format("{0:0.#}", 0.0);            // "0"
String.Format("{0:#.0}", 0.0);            // ".0"
String.Format("{0:#.#}", 0.0);            // ""

Align numbers with spaces
String.Format("{0,10:0.0}", 123.4567);    // "     123.5"
String.Format("{0,-10:0.0}", 123.4567);   // "123.5     "
String.Format("{0,10:0.0}", -123.4567);   // "    -123.5"
String.Format("{0,-10:0.0}", -123.4567);  // "-123.5    "

Custom formatting for negative numbers and zero
String.Format("{0:0.00;minus 0.00;zero}", 123.4567);   // "123.46"
String.Format("{0:0.00;minus 0.00;zero}", -123.4567);  // "minus 123.46"
String.Format("{0:0.00;minus 0.00;zero}", 0.0);        // "zero"

Some funny examples
String.Format("{0:my number is 0.0}", 12.3);   // "my number is 12.3"
String.Format("{0:0aaa.bbb0}", 12.3);

Take a look at this MSDN reference. In the notes it states that the numbers are rounded to the number of decimal places requested.

If instead you use "{0:R}" it will produce what's referred to as a "round-trip" value, take a look at this MSDN reference for more info, here's my code and the output:

double d = 10 * 0.69;
Console.WriteLine("  {0:R}", d);
Console.WriteLine("+ {0:F20}", 6.9 - d);
Console.WriteLine("= {0:F20}", 6.9);

output

  6.8999999999999995
+ 0.00000000000000088818
= 6.90000000000000000000