How to use a decimal range() step value?

Question

Is there a way to step between 0 and 1 by 0.1?

I thought I could do it like the following, but it failed:

for i in range(0, 1, 0.1):
    print i

Instead, it says that the step argument cannot be zero, which I did not expect.

Answer 1

Python's range() can only do integers, not floating point. In your specific case, you can use a list comprehension instead:

[x * 0.1 for x in range(0, 10)]

(Replace the call to range with that expression.)

For the more general case, you may want to write a custom function or generator.

Answer 2

It can be done using Numpy library. arange() function allows steps in float. But, it returns a numpy array which can be converted to list using tolist() for our convenience.

for i in np.arange(0, 1, 0.1).tolist():
   print i

Answer 3

start and stop are inclusive rather than one or the other (usually stop is excluded) and without imports, and using generators

def rangef(start, stop, step, fround=5):
    """
    Yields sequence of numbers from start (inclusive) to stop (inclusive)
    by step (increment) with rounding set to n digits.

    :param start: start of sequence
    :param stop: end of sequence
    :param step: int or float increment (e.g. 1 or 0.001)
    :param fround: float rounding, n decimal places
    :return:
    """
    try:
        i = 0
        while stop >= start and step > 0:
            if i==0:
                yield start
            elif start >= stop:
                yield stop
            elif start < stop:
                if start == 0:
                    yield 0
                if start != 0:
                    yield start
            i += 1
            start += step
            start = round(start, fround)
        else:
            pass
    except TypeError as e:
        yield "type-error({})".format(e)
    else:
        pass


# passing
print(list(rangef(-100.0,10.0,1)))
print(list(rangef(-100,0,0.5)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.2)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.1)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.05)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.02)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.01)))
print(list(rangef(-1,1,0.005)))
# failing: type-error:
print(list(rangef("1","10","1")))
print(list(rangef(1,10,"1")))

Python 3.6.2 (v3.6.2:5fd33b5, Jul 8 2017, 04:57:36) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)]

Answer 4

This one liner will not clutter your code. The sign of the step parameter is important.

def frange(start, stop, step):
    return [x*step+start for x in range(0,round(abs((stop-start)/step)+0.5001),
        int((stop-start)/step<0)*-2+1)]

Answer 5

Rather than using a decimal step directly, it's much safer to express this in terms of how many points you want. Otherwise, floating-point rounding error is likely to give you a wrong result.

You can use the linspace function from the NumPy library (which isn't part of the standard library but is relatively easy to obtain). linspace takes a number of points to return, and also lets you specify whether or not to include the right endpoint:

>>> np.linspace(0,1,11)
array([ 0. ,  0.1,  0.2,  0.3,  0.4,  0.5,  0.6,  0.7,  0.8,  0.9,  1. ])
>>> np.linspace(0,1,10,endpoint=False)
array([ 0. ,  0.1,  0.2,  0.3,  0.4,  0.5,  0.6,  0.7,  0.8,  0.9])

If you really want to use a floating-point step value, you can, with numpy.arange.

>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.arange(0.0, 1.0, 0.1)
array([ 0. ,  0.1,  0.2,  0.3,  0.4,  0.5,  0.6,  0.7,  0.8,  0.9])

Floating-point rounding error will cause problems, though. Here's a simple case where rounding error causes arange to produce a length-4 array when it should only produce 3 numbers:

>>> numpy.arange(1, 1.3, 0.1)
array([1. , 1.1, 1.2, 1.3])

Answer 6

The range() built-in function returns a sequence of integer values, I'm afraid, so you can't use it to do a decimal step.

I'd say just use a while loop:

i = 0.0
while i <= 1.0:
    print i
    i += 0.1

If you're curious, Python is converting your 0.1 to 0, which is why it's telling you the argument can't be zero.