Javascript: formatting a rounded number to N decimals

Question

in JavaScript, the typical way to round a number to N decimal places is something like:

function roundNumber(num, dec) {
  return Math.round(num * Math.pow(10, dec)) / Math.pow(10, dec);
}

function roundNumber(num, dec) {
  return Math.round(num * Math.pow(10, dec)) / Math.pow(10, dec);
}

console.log(roundNumber(0.1 + 0.2, 2));
console.log(roundNumber(2.1234, 2));

However this approach will round to a maximum of N decimal places while I want to always round to N decimal places. For example "2.0" would be rounded to "2".

Any ideas?

Guffa_69083 · Answer

That's not a rounding ploblem, that is a display problem. A number doesn't contain information about significant digits; the value 2 is the same as 2.0000000000000. It's when you turn the rounded value into a string that you have make it display a certain number of digits.

You could just add zeroes after the number, something like:

var s = number.toString();
if (s.indexOf('.') == -1) s += '.';
while (s.length < s.indexOf('.') + 4) s += '0';

(Note that this assumes that the regional settings of the client uses period as decimal separator, the code needs some more work to function for other settings.)

user_903783 · Answer

This works for rounding to N digits (if you just want to truncate to N digits remove the Math.round call and use the Math.trunc one):

function roundN(value, digits) {
   var tenToN = 10 ** digits;
   return /*Math.trunc*/(Math.round(value * tenToN)) / tenToN;
}

Had to resort to such logic at Java in the past when I was authoring data manipulation E-Slate components. That is since I had found out that adding 0.1 many times to 0 you'd end up with some unexpectedly long decimal part (this is due to floating point arithmetics).

A user comment at Format number to always show 2 decimal places calls this technique scaling.

Some mention there are cases that don't round as expected and at http://www.jacklmoore.com/notes/rounding-in-javascript/ this is suggested instead:

function round(value, decimals) {
  return Number(Math.round(value+'e'+decimals)+'e-'+decimals);
}

Christoph_48015 · Answer

Hopefully working code (didn't do much testing):

function toFixed(value, precision) {
    var precision = precision || 0,
        neg = value < 0,
        power = Math.pow(10, precision),
        value = Math.round(value * power),
        integral = String((neg ? Math.ceil : Math.floor)(value / power)),
        fraction = String((neg ? -value : value) % power),
        padding = new Array(Math.max(precision - fraction.length, 0) + 1).join('0');

    return precision ? integral + '.' +  padding + fraction : integral;
}

user_9044183 · Answer

function roundton(num, n) {
    return Number(num.toFixed(n));
}

This uses JS's built-in method Number.prototype.toFixed which is meant for formatting strings but allows us to round to a specific number of digits. the Number() call converts it back to a number object cleanly

Ideally, we wouldn't need to convert it to a string, but toFixed is written in native C++ doing basic cstring operations so it's likely still fast.

Javascript: formatting a rounded number to N decimals

10 Answers