C# – Double to string conversion without scientific notation

cfloating pointnetnumber-formatting

How to convert a double into a floating-point string representation without scientific notation in the .NET Framework?

"Small" samples (effective numbers may be of any size, such as 1.5E200 or 1e-200) :

3248971234698200000000000000000000000000000000
0.00000000000000000000000000000000000023897356978234562

None of the standard number formats are like this, and a custom format also doesn't seem to allow having an open number of digits after the decimal separator.

This is not a duplicate of How to convert double to string without the power to 10 representation (E-05) because the answers given there do not solve the issue at hand. The accepted solution in this question was to use a fixed point (such as 20 digits), which is not what I want. A fixed point formatting and trimming the redundant 0 doesn't solve the issue either because the max width for fixed width is 99 characters.

Note: the solution has to deal correctly with custom number formats (e.g. other decimal separator, depending on culture information).

Edit: The question is really only about displaing aforementioned numbers. I'm aware of how floating point numbers work and what numbers can be used and computed with them.

Best Answer

For a general-purpose¹ solution you need to preserve 339 places:

doubleValue.ToString("0." + new string('#', 339))

The maximum number of non-zero decimal digits is 16. 15 are on the right side of the decimal point. The exponent can move those 15 digits a maximum of 324 places to the right. (See the range and precision.)

It works for double.Epsilon, double.MinValue, double.MaxValue, and anything in between.

The performance will be much greater than the regex/string manipulation solutions since all formatting and string work is done in one pass by unmanaged CLR code. Also, the code is much simpler to prove correct.

For ease of use and even better performance, make it a constant:

public static class FormatStrings
{
    public const string DoubleFixedPoint = "0.###################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################";
}

¹ Update: I mistakenly said that this was also a lossless solution. In fact it is not, since ToString does its normal display rounding for all formats except r. Live example. Thanks, @Loathing! Please see Lothing’s answer if you need the ability to roundtrip in fixed point notation (i.e, if you’re using .ToString("r") today).