Round with significant digits
Editor's Note: This file was selected as MATLAB Central Pick of the Week
This little function rounds a number (or the elements of a vector ot matrix) towards the nearest number with N significant digits.
Examples:
roundsd(0.012345,3) returns 0.0123
roundsd(12345,2) returns 12000
roundsd(12.345,4,'ceil') returns 12.35
This is a useful complement to Matlab's ROUND, ROUND10 and ROUNDN (Mapping toolbox), especially when dealing with data with a large variety of order of magnitudes.
I was about to upload this file when I found "sd_round.m" by Edward Zechmann (see aknowledgment), which has similar feature (and more). But, because my script is very different in coding (much much shorter), I decided to share it anyway.
Cite As
François Beauducel (2021). Round with significant digits (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/26212-round-with-significant-digits), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .
Comments and Ratings (29)
MATLAB Release Compatibility
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS LinuxCategories
Tags
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!Discover Live Editor
Create scripts with code, output, and formatted text in a single executable document.
Select a Web Site
Choose a web site to get translated content where available and see local events and offers. Based on your location, we recommend that you select: .
Select web siteYou can also select a web site from the following list:
Americas
- América Latina (Español)
- Canada (English)
- United States (English)
Europe
- Belgium (English)
- Denmark (English)
- Deutschland (Deutsch)
- España (Español)
- Finland (English)
- France (Français)
- Ireland (English)
- Italia (Italiano)
- Luxembourg (English)
- Netherlands (English)
- Norway (English)
- Österreich (Deutsch)
- Portugal (English)
- Sweden (English)
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom (English)
Thanks for the excellent little utility. I like the different rounding methods that are supported.
The error Colin Morris identified is in line 74:
if ~ischar(method) || ~ismember(opt,method)
The problem comes from the "ismember(opt, method)" requirement. From the R2011b
documentation, "ismember" returns a logical array the same size as the first argument.
Replacing the line with this:
if ~ischar(method) || ~ismember(method, opt)
fixes the problem.
How is this function different from the Matlab built-in funciton chop?
I noticed chop doesn't have a doc page, so it's impossible to find with docsearch.
Running on 2011a. I believe if found an error between lines 73-76. When explicitly stating the method ( i.e. 'fix',or 'ceil'), I receive the runtime error :
??? Operands to the || and && operators must be convertible to logical scalar values.
Error in ==> roundsd at 74
if ~ischar(method) || ~ismember(opt,method)
commenting the else statement between lines 73-76 solves the issue for me.
-C
Great function. I should find it earlier.
Will, it's a precision problem of floating point arithmetic. Try:
3.55/0.1-35.5
ans =
-7.105427357601e-15
This little number trigger the balance. I think it's hard to overcome.
Does not work in all cases. Try rounding 3.55 to 1 decimal place and you get 3.5 instead of 3.6
veru good
a very useful extension to the usual round functions.
one small speed improvement can be achieved. Using find is very slow. one can use logical indexing just like this:
y(x==0) = 0;
it does the same job while much faster with lager arrays.
Thanks,
Tobi
Very nice simple and compact code.
Should be build into next Matlab versions.
Much appreciated -- thanks.
So useful that it should be built in to the Matlab round function, as it is in other languages
I think your submission deserves a much better overall rating.
Thanks Oleg.
Yes, I will complete the "see also" function list in future updates.
1) you effectively need the "find" in Matlab versions < 7... and also single pipe for the OR test.
2) like you I have hesitated between "switch" and "feval". But the feval code is much shorter...
François.
I would mention in the see also line the other rounding functions you use.
I never used matlab < 7 so I don't know if this applies:
1) no need to use find: y(find(x==0)) = 0;
2) I would use switch case instead of feval.
Oleg
Thanks Daniel for your time. I submitted an updated version that corrects the zero-value behaviour, and I added some options for the rounding method.
About the mlint messages, I kept my original syntax which is voluntarily backward compatible (with Matlab versions < 7).
I also noticed some mlint-messages that I fixed. The core of the code now looks like this:
if ~isnumeric(n) || numel(n) ~= 1 || n < 0 || mod(n,1) ~= 0
error('N argument must be a scalar positive integer.')
end
valuesZero = (x==0);
og = 10.^(floor(log10(abs(x)) - n + 1));
y = round(x./og).*og;
y(valuesZero) = 0;
I just wrote one of these and was anout to upload it. But since you had allready done it, there is no point. This file would get a very high mark by me for several reasons:
1) Simple function, no bloated features
2) Error checking.
3) Well formated documentation.
Unfortunately, your script doesn't handle 0. That pulls down the mark significantly.