[Tex/LaTex] Rounding numbers in a table / Truncating text in table

formattingtables

Is it possible to have automatic rounding of numbers in a table?

Say that I have this, made in the usual way with a tabular environment:

pi  | 3.14592654
e   | 2.7182818284
phi | 1.6180339887

Can I control how many significant digits are shown without truncating the numbers manually myself?

So for example, if I need four significant digits, the numbers should appear as

pi  | 3.1459
e   | 2.7183
phi | 1.6180

Bonus points for actually rounding the numbers according to the usual rules without simply truncating them.

I understand this is probably non-trivial, so here's a relaxed version that will also work in my circumstances (all numbers have one and the same precision and character count):

(How) Can I control how many characters are rendered in a column of a table?

So if I define the text in the columns as:

\begin{tabular} % some black magic column definition
   text & alongword\\
   text & anotherlongword\\
   text & morelongwords\\
\end{tabular}

I'd like to get something like:

text along
text anoth
text morel

I know there are non-TeX ways to do this, and I will probably resolve to writing a script if all else fails, but I'm curious whether there's a way to do it solely with TeX & friends.

Best Answer

For numbers:

There are some packages, like siunitx and math engine of tikz (especially in pgfplotstable), which can used to format numbers in LaTeX. numprint may be the simplest one, and can be easily used in tabulars.

numprint package privides n and N column types for numbers in tabular, and \nprounddigits for set the precision. An example:

% \usepackage{numprint} in preamble
\npdecimalsign{.}
\nprounddigits{2}
\begin{tabular}{c|n{5}{2}|}
foo & 12345 \\
bar & 12345.12345 \\
baz & 0.00012345 \\
\end{tabular}
\npnoround

Please read the manual for more options.

For common characters, @TH has showed some TeX trick. However, you can use xstring package or something else to do the dirty work. I don't know how to get full control in tabular, so here is just a incomplete solution, a mix of xtring and primitive TeX:

\halign{\StrLeft{#}{4} \cr
 abc \cr
 abcde \cr
 abcdefg \cr
}

Any further suggestions are welcome.

Related Question