printing doubles and robustness of setw()

[utab]

Dear all,

On a formatted printing operation that I am trying to accomplish for
doubles, I have a question. I would like to print a double, d, and its
square, d*d, but I would like to make the argument to be computed upon
the length of the numbers(d and d*d) so that it lines up neatly in the
columns. For this operation, I need the number of digits in a double,
however, due to floating point representation, the double values are
not represented exactly. So is there a way to find the number of
digits of a double number in a robust way for print out?

P.S. For integers I coded a similar version like the one I explained
above but for doubles the above problem made me think on that a bit.

Rgds,

[Kai-Uwe Bux]

utab wrote:

Dear all,

On a formatted printing operation that I am trying to accomplish for
doubles, I have a question. I would like to print a double, d, and its
square, d*d, but I would like to make the argument to be computed upon
the length of the numbers(d and d*d) so that it lines up neatly in the
columns. For this operation, I need the number of digits in a double,
however, due to floating point representation, the double values are
not represented exactly.

Nit: each double (apart from special values such as nan) represents a real
number and does so exactly. It just might happen that you are not
interested in that number but in a number nearby. But that is not the fault
of the double.

So is there a way to find the number of
digits of a double number in a robust way for print out?

I would print the doubles into strings and then search for the decimal
point.

P.S. For integers I coded a similar version like the one I explained
above but for doubles the above problem made me think on that a bit.

Best

Kai-Uwe Bux

[utab]

On Apr 2, 12:14 am, Kai-Uwe Bux <[e-mail]:

utab wrote:

Dear all,

On a formatted printing operation that I am trying to accomplish for
doubles, I have a question. I would like to print a double, d, and its
square, d*d, but I would like to make the argument to be computed upon
the length of the numbers(d and d*d) so that it lines up neatly in the
columns. For this operation, I need the number of digits in a double,
however, due to floating point representation, the double values are
not represented exactly.

Nit: each double (apart from special values such as nan) represents a real
number and does so exactly. It just might happen that you are not
interested in that number but in a number nearby. But that is not the fault
of the double.

Thx for the reply. Ok, but it is not exact anyway in mathematical
sense ;)
exact in the *closest* sense.

>

So is there a way to find the number of
digits of a double number in a robust way for print out?

I would print the doubles into strings and then search for the decimal
point.

I forgot to tell that I wanted to constraint myself to find a solution
without stringstreams(by printing to strings, you mean to use a
stringstream I suppose). Do not find this as a stupid idea, I wanted
to develop a solutions list for the "Accelerated C++ book" and this
question is related to Exercise 4.4, till then on no stringstreams are
mentioned, this is the reason of the constraint ;)

Best,

>

P.S. For integers I coded a similar version like the one I explained
above but for doubles the above problem made me think on that a bit.

Best

Kai-Uwe Bux