Calculating PI

[Katana24]

Hello - I have created a program which calculates the value of PI. All the calculations work well but the aim of the program is to get the user to input a number - say 7 and my program will print the value of PI to 7 decimal places.

I realise there is a DecimalFormatter and I used to 8 decimal places, for e.g.

// Method to format output to 8 decimal places
	public static String toEightString( double quantity ) 
	{
        DecimalFormat currQuant = new DecimalFormat("#.#########");
        return currQuant.format( quantity );
    }

But this isn't feasible if the user enters 100 - Im not going to create a hundred methods like the above! So I thought of converting the value of PI, of type double, to a float and then using the formatter like below:

float toDP = (float)quantity;
		int totalNum = numDP+1;
		
		System.out.printf( "%totalNum.numDPf", toDP );

So this was suppose to print, say user enters 4, 5 numbers in total with 4 past the decimal place. But when I call it it returns an error.

So what is the best way to format the output?

Cheers

[masijade]

Well this

"#.#########"

is a String right?

So what's wrong with doing

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("#.");
for (int i = 0; i < userInputedNumber; i++) {
  sb.append("#");
}
DecimalFormat currQuant = new DecimalFormat(sb.toString());

[Katana24]

Admittedly I wasn't aware of the method you outlined. It works fine but my logic seems to be somewhat incorrect in places. I know I should probably start a new post for this but does java impose a limiter on results in calculations? Like it will only show you the number to 8 decimal places?

Im asking because in my PI program, I print PI unformatted first and then formatted after, using the method above:

PI equals 3.1415926139392147
PI to 10 decimal places equals 3.1415926139

But PI equals, according to google, PI = 3.14159265. This means that rounding is occurring somewhere?

[masijade]

http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html