More elegant way to round decimals in Python?

Question

I am working with currencies, and so have been using the decimal module to rule out any floating point weirdness in the following maths.

I have to add together a number of decimal amounts, find an average of them, add ten percent, and then round it to the nearest round £. I then need to do more decimal maths with the output, so it'll need to be a decimal (or an integer) so I can play with it. Adding the decimals has been fairly straightforward, but doing the rest of the maths has left me with this line:

result = decimal.Decimal(round((sum_of_items / count_of_items) * decimal.Decimal(1.1), 0))

It strikes me that this isn't particularly elegant, as I'm converting the decimal average+10% to a float just to round it off, and then turning the result back into a decimal.

Am I risking any floating point weirdness with that brief conversion back to floating point? And is there any way to achieve the same effect as round using the decimal module so I don't have to go decimal->float->decimal?

Answer 1

I was actually unaware of the decimal module -- I've +1 your question just for that.

Taking a quick look at the docs, Decimal is specifically designed to avoid artifacts of binary floats and work like "people" math. Because of that I would be suspicious of the conversion to float, no matter how brief. Can you use the quantize() function instead of round()? The quantize method "rounds a number to a fixed exponent. This method is useful for monetary applications that often round results to a fixed number of places" and sounds well suited to your application.

Answer 2

I thin you should rely more on the Decimal object to do the right thing; rather than rounding, set your precision with, for instance: getcontext().prec=6 and then just do Decimal(sum_of_items) / Decimal(count_of_items) * Decimal(1.1)

Alternately, just do all your multiplies before you do your divides, to keep the most precision.