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g format loses to much information, #95
Description
[I misspelt "too" in the title. Sorry! I don't know how to fix it.]
I'm quite surprised by this:
using Format
format("{1:.2g}", 0.00093) # -> "0.00"
whereas this Fortran program
program main
write(*,"(G0.2)") 0.00093d0 ! -> "0.93E-3"
end program mainprints "0.93E-3".
I thought the whole point of the G format specifier is to minimize information loss while minimizing the horizontal space. Is Format.jl's behavior intended? or am I missing something?
Format v1.3.7 on Julia 1.12.4.
Activity
ScottPJones commentedon Oct 5, 2026
I'll start looking at this now (I'd been ill for a while, didn't see this).
You can use the StrFormat.jl instead for now, i.e.
f"\%.2g(0.00093)"which does give correct results.(I inherited the python style formatting code from the now obsolete Formatting.jl, and it has two totally different code paths for the C style and the Python style formatting functions, unfortunately. Since I don't use the python style ones, I hadn't caught all of the errors in that code while trying to clean it up.