Formatting floats without trailing zeros

Question

How can I format a float so that it doesn\'t contain trailing zeros? In other words, I want the resulting string to be as short as possible.

For example:

<         


        

Answer 1

What about trying the easiest and probably most effective approach? The method normalize() removes all the rightmost trailing zeros.

from decimal import Decimal

print (Decimal('0.001000').normalize())
# Result: 0.001

Works in Python 2 and Python 3.

-- Updated --

The only problem as @BobStein-VisiBone pointed out, is that numbers like 10, 100, 1000... will be displayed in exponential representation. This can be easily fixed using the following function instead:

from decimal import Decimal


def format_float(f):
    d = Decimal(str(f));
    return d.quantize(Decimal(1)) if d == d.to_integral() else d.normalize()