Dealing with float precision in Javascript

I have a large amount of numeric values y in javascript. I want to group them by rounding them down to the nearest multiple of x and convert the result to a string.

How do I get around the annoying floating point precision?

For example:

0.2 + 0.4 = 0.6000000000000001

Two things I have tried:

>>> y = 1.23456789 
>>> x = 0.2 
>>> parseInt(Math.round(Math.floor(y/x))) * x; 
1.2000000000000002

and:

>>> y = 1.23456789 
>>> x = 0.2 
>>> y - (y % x)
1.2000000000000002

From this post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1458633/elegant-workaround-for-javascript-floating-point-number-problem

You have a few options:

• Use a special datatype for decimals, like decimal.js
• Format your result to some fixed number of significant digits, like this: (Math.floor(y/x) * x).toFixed(2)
• Convert all your numbers to integers

You could do something like this:

> +(Math.floor(y/x)*x).toFixed(15);
1.2

Edit: It would be better to use big.js.

big.js

> A small, fast, easy-to-use library for arbitrary-precision decimal arithmetic.

>> bigX = new Big(x)
>> bigY = new Big(y)
>> bigY.div(bigX).round().times(bigX).toNumber() // => 1.2

> var x = 0.1
> var y = 0.2
> var cf = 10
> x * y
0.020000000000000004
> (x * cf) * (y * cf) / (cf * cf)
0.02

Quick solution:

var _cf = (function() {
  function _shift(x) {
    var parts = x.toString().split('.');
    return (parts.length < 2) ? 1 : Math.pow(10, parts[1].length);
  }
  return function() { 
    return Array.prototype.reduce.call(arguments, function (prev, next) { return prev === undefined || next === undefined ? undefined : Math.max(prev, _shift (next)); }, -Infinity);
  };
})();

Math.a = function () {
  var f = _cf.apply(null, arguments); if(f === undefined) return undefined;
  function cb(x, y, i, o) { return x + f * y; }
  return Array.prototype.reduce.call(arguments, cb, 0) / f;
};

Math.s = function (l,r) { var f = _cf(l,r); return (l * f - r * f) / f; };

Math.m = function () {
  var f = _cf.apply(null, arguments);
  function cb(x, y, i, o) { return (x*f) * (y*f) / (f * f); }
  return Array.prototype.reduce.call(arguments, cb, 1);
};

Math.d = function (l,r) { var f = _cf(l,r); return (l * f) / (r * f); };

> Math.m(0.1, 0.2)
0.02

You can check the full explanation here.

Check out this link.. It helped me a lot.

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_toprecision.asp

The toPrecision(no_of_digits_required) function returns a string so don't forget to use the parseFloat() function to convert to decimal point of required precision.

Tackling this task, I'd first find the number of decimal places in x, then round y accordingly. I'd use:

y.toFixed(x.toString().split(".")[1].length);

It should convert x to a string, split it over the decimal point, find the length of the right part, and then y.toFixed(length) should round y based on that length.