Programming

17496 readers

38 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

What is this format specifier? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

What is %.2f? Why is it not just %f? Is there some additional calculation happening? The half function already does all the calculations including splitting the bill, so I'm not sure what %.2f is. (Btw why is this code not formatting correctly in lemmy?)


#include 
#include 

float half(float bill, float tax, int tip);

int main(void)
{
    float bill_amount = get_float("Bill before tax and tip: ");
    float tax_percent = get_float("Sale Tax Percent: ");
    int tip_percent = get_int("Tip percent: ");

    printf("You will owe $%.2f each!\n", half(bill_amount, tax_percent, tip_percent));
}

// TODO: Complete the function
float half(float bill, float tax, int tip)
{
    bill += (bill * (tax / 100.0));
    bill += (bill * (tip / 100.0));

    bill /= 2;

    return bill;
}

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] JackbyDev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Which part of that is confusing to you? We can help make it easier to understand.

Edit: Oh, this isn't even OP.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The confusion is you just provided sample code showing how "%.2f" works - you didn't answer the question which was what does that sequence of characters actually mean? What does the % do. What does the . do. What does the 2 do. What does the f do.

OP needs to know the answer to all of those.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

OP got the answer to those in another comment, I'm asking what part they need help understanding in this link. Also, I didn't provide the link.

Edit: Nevermind, I mistook the comment for being OP.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Its not confusion to me, I get what it is. Its the style of answer. Its like if you see a dog, ask what it is and someone answers Canis lupus familiaris.

There's no grokking that. You either know or you don't. If they're asking what .2f then lots of answers here do a good job describing that it formats the value to two decimal places. We can all do something with that at any level.

Saying its a crombopulater sub cablator is much harder to process. It just seems like an answer thats likely to make the person to have to ask more questions or frustrated

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Its like if you see a dog, ask what it is and someone answers Canis lupus familiaris.

...and gives you a link to the Wikipedia page about dogs.

It's not a good answer in the sense that they did not do the work of copying and rephrasing the content of the website they linked, you have to do some of the work yourself. But it's a very thorough answer that gives you all the information you need about formatting. Including examples of pretty much exactly the question OP asked.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not looking for meta level criticism of this style of advice, I'm trying to ask OP what was confusing on this page and help them learn how to read this page specifically. I'm not saying OP should be able to understand this page. I'm not saying this style of advice is acceptable or not.

Edit: Nevermind, I thought OP posted that comment.