Objective-c – Limit a double to two decimal places

It is not a matter of how the number is stored, it is a matter of how you are displaying it. When converting it to a string you must round to the desired precision, which in your case is two decimal places.

E.g.:

NSString* formattedNumber = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%.02f", myFloat];

%.02f tells the formatter that you will be formatting a float (%f) and, that should be rounded to two places, and should be padded with 0s.

E.g.:

%f = 25.000000
%.f = 25
%.02f = 25.00

Background: Some answers suggested on this page (e.g., signif, options(digits=...)) do not guarantee that a certain number of decimals are displayed for an arbitrary number. I presume this is a design feature in R whereby good scientific practice involves showing a certain number of digits based on principles of "significant figures". However, in many domains (e.g., APA style, business reports) formatting requirements dictate that a certain number of decimal places are displayed. This is often done for consistency and standardisation purposes rather than being concerned with significant figures.

Solution:

The following code shows exactly two decimal places for the number x.

format(round(x, 2), nsmall = 2)

For example:

format(round(1.20, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.20"
format(round(1, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.00"
format(round(1.1234, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.12"

A more general function is as follows where x is the number and k is the number of decimals to show. trimws removes any leading white space which can be useful if you have a vector of numbers.

specify_decimal <- function(x, k) trimws(format(round(x, k), nsmall=k))

E.g.,

specify_decimal(1234, 5)
# [1] "1234.00000"
specify_decimal(0.1234, 5)
# [1] "0.12340"