I need to find the relative error between 2 variable, the one in format short and the other in format long. How can I take the same variable, once in short and once in long so I can subtract the two?
MATLAB: Format short and format long
variable
Related Solutions
To control how numbers are displayed in the Variable Viewer, you can set the format in the Preferences:
Home tab, in the Environment section, click Preferences. Select MATLAB > Variables.
rawStrMod = '0.0000000001, 0.3';"It gives me 0.000000000100000, not exactly the same as 0.0000000001."
Ignoring formatting issues, none of the Mathworks toolboxes are able to give you exactly the same as 0.0000000001 . MATLAB is not able to store 0.0000000001 exactly in binary floating point: the closest it can get in binary floating point is 0.00000000010000000000000000364321973154977415791655470655996396089904010295867919921875
The closest Mathworks tool can get is by using the Symbolic Toolbox, for which sym('0.0000000001') gives you something that is closer to 0.0000000001 than you can get without the Symbolic Toolbox, but if you probe hard enough you can prove that sym('0.0000000001') is implemented as a binary ratio whose asymptotic accuracy is bounded by truncations of 10/3 bits per digit of accuracy requested (log2(10) would perhaps be expected but the model turned out to be 10/3: some of the bits are being used for overhead of extended precision values.)
Everything else is just formatting (and perhaps keeping track of sizes). There are only a few formatting options available for default numeric display. For anything else you should be using sprintf() or fprintf() for fine detailed display.
rawStrMod = '0.0000000001, 0.3, 0.0000000001000, 123';T = regexp(rawStrMod, '\s*,\s*', 'split');T_numeric = str2double(T);T_input_digits = cellfun(@length,regexprep(T,{'^[^.]*$', '^.*\.'},{'', ''},'once', 'lineanchors'));T_data = num2cell( [T_input_digits(:),T_numeric(:)].' );fprintf('%.*f\n', T_data{:});Output is
0.00000000010.30.0000000001000123The input was converted to numeric (T_numeric), but the number of decimal places was tracked, and that number is used to format the output.
This code does have a subtle problem:
- if you have an integer like the 123, then it is entirely reasonable that the output should not contain a decimal place, like happens here, with the number of decimal places being detected to be 0
- however, if the 123 were instead 123. with no digits following the decimal places, then the number of decimal places would be considered to be 0, and when told to use 0 decimal places, the %f format item does not put in the trailing decimal point, so 123. would print out as 123 with the code as implemented being unable to format 123 on input differently than 123. on input.
Best Answer