Avoiding problems with JavaScript's weird decimal calculations

Question

I just read on MDN that one of the quirks of JS\'s handling of numbers due to everything being \"double-precision 64-bit format IEEE 754 values\" is that when you d

Answer 1

There are libraries that seek to solve this problem but if you don't want to include one of those (or can't for some reason, like working inside a GTM variable) then you can use this little function I wrote:

Usage:

var a = 194.1193;
var b = 159;
a - b; // returns 35.11930000000001
doDecimalSafeMath(a, '-', b); // returns 35.1193

Here's the function:

function doDecimalSafeMath(a, operation, b, precision) {
    function decimalLength(numStr) {
        var pieces = numStr.toString().split(".");
        if(!pieces[1]) return 0;
        return pieces[1].length;
    }

    // Figure out what we need to multiply by to make everything a whole number
    precision = precision || Math.pow(10, Math.max(decimalLength(a), decimalLength(b)));

    a = a*precision;
    b = b*precision;

    // Figure out which operation to perform.
    var operator;
    switch(operation.toLowerCase()) {
        case '-':
            operator = function(a,b) { return a - b; }
        break;
        case '+':
            operator = function(a,b) { return a + b; }
        break;
        case '*':
        case 'x':
            precision = precision*precision;
            operator = function(a,b) { return a * b; }
        break;
        case '÷':
        case '/':
            precision = 1;
            operator = function(a,b) { return a / b; }
        break;

        // Let us pass in a function to perform other operations.
        default:
            operator = operation;
    }

    var result = operator(a,b);

    // Remove our multiplier to put the decimal back.
    return result/precision;
}