How can I force division to be floating point? Div

Question

I have two integer values a and b, but I need their ratio in floating point. I know that a < b and I want to calculate a / b, so if I use integer division I'll always get 0 with a remainder of a.

How can I force c to be a floating point number in Python in the following?

c = a / b

Answer 1

If you want to use "true" (floating point) division by default, there is a command line flag:

python -Q new foo.py

There are some drawbacks (from the PEP):

It has been argued that a command line option to change the default is evil. It can certainly be dangerous in the wrong hands: for example, it would be impossible to combine a 3rd party library package that requires -Qnew with another one that requires -Qold.

You can learn more about the other flags values that change / warn-about the behavior of division by looking at the python man page.

For full details on division changes read: PEP 238 -- Changing the Division Operator