How do you make a division problem in c programming go into a decimal?

Answer 1

When dividing one integer with another, there's a high probability that the answer will not be an integer. To deal with this, you must cast the numerator or denominator to a floating point type (float or double). By way of an example, consider the following code snippet:

int x=5, y=2;

int z = x/y;

float f1 = x/y;

float f2 = ( float ) x/y;

float f3 = x/( float ) y;

printf( "x=%d, y=%d, z=%d, f1=%f, f2=%f, f3=%f\n", x, y, z, f1, f2, f3 );

Output:

x=5, y=2, z=2, f1=2.000000, f2=2.500000, f3=2.500000

Clearly the correct answer is shown by f2 and f3. This is because we explicitly cast the numerator or denominator in each case. So long as we cast one or the other (or both), the result will be correct. If we don't cast either, then we're effectively only converting the result of the integer division, which is effectively the same as casting z to a float, as shown by f1.

See the related links section for in-depth information on floating point arithmetic in C/C++.