Float to String format specifier

Question

I have some float values I want to convert to a string, I want to keep the formatting the same when converting, i.e. 999.0000(float) -> 999.0000(String). My problem is when the values contain an arbitrary number of zeroes after the decimal point, as in the previous example, they are stripped away when converting to a string, so the result I actually end up with is 999.

I looked at the format specifiers for the toString() method on MSDN, the RoundTrip ('R') specifier looks like it will produce what I want, but it is only supported for Single, Double and BigInt variables. Is there a format specifier like this for float variables?? Or would it be easier to just convert the values to doubles?

UPDATE: Just for clarity, the reason why I want to keep the trailing zeroes is because I'm doing a comparison of decimal places, i.e. I'm comparing the number of digits after the decimal place between two values. So for example, 1.00 and 1.00000 have a different number of digits after the decimal point. I know it's a strange request, it's for work and the requirement is coming from on high.

UPDATE 2-3-11:

I was thinking about this too hard, I'm reading the numbers from a txt file and then parsing them as floats, I'm going to modify the program to check whether the string values are decimals or whole numbers. Sorry for wasting your time, although this was very insightful.

Solution 1

Firstly, as Etienne says, float in C# is Single. It is just the C# keyword for that data type.

So you can definitely do this:

float f = 13.5f;
string s = f.ToString("R");

Secondly, you have referred a couple of times to the number's "format"; numbers don't have formats, they only have values. Strings have formats. Which makes me wonder: what is this thing you have that has a format but is not a string? The closest thing I can think of would be decimal, which does maintain its own precision; however, calling simply decimal.ToString should have the effect you want in that case.

How about including some example code so we can see exactly what you're doing, and why it isn't achieving what you want?

Solution 2

Use ToString() with this format:

12345.678901.ToString("0.0000"); // outputs 12345.6789
12345.0.ToString("0.0000"); // outputs 12345.0000

Put as much zero as necessary at the end of the format.

Solution 3

You can pass a format string to the ToString method, like so:

ToString("N4"); // 4 decimal points Number

If you want to see more modifiers, take a look at MSDN - Standard Numeric Format Strings

Solution 4

In C#, float is an alias for System.Single (a bit like intis an alias for System.Int32).

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