Following a remark here: How to define a new string formatter, I tried subclassing string.Formatter
. Here is what I've done. Unfortunately I seem to have broken it in the process
import string
from math import floor, log10
class CustFormatter(string.Formatter):
"Defines special formatting"
def __init__(self):
super(CustFormatter, self).__init__()
def powerise10(self, x):
if x == 0: return 0, 0
Neg = x < 0
if Neg: x = -x
a = 1.0 * x / 10**(floor(log10(x)))
b = int(floor(log10(x)))
if Neg: a = -a
return a, b
def eng(self, x):
a, b = self.powerise10(x)
if -3 < b < 3: return "%.4g" % x
a = a * 10**(b%3)
b = b - b%3
return "%.4g*10^%s" % (a, b)
def format_field(self, value, format_string):
# handle an invalid format
if format_string == "i":
return self.eng(value)
else:
return super(CustFormatter,self).format_field(value, format_string)
fmt = CustFormatter()
print('{}'.format(0.055412))
print(fmt.format("{0:i} ", 55654654231654))
print(fmt.format("{} ", 0.00254641))
As if as in the last line, I don't refer to the variables by position, I get a KeyError
. It is obviously expecting a key which is optional in the original class but I don't understand why and I am not sure what I've done wrong.