How can I force division to be floating point? Division keeps rounding down to 0?

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 2 in the following?

c = a / b

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_{In 3.x, the behaviour is reversed; see Why does integer division yield a float instead of another integer? for the opposite, 3.x-specific problem.}

Answer 1

In Python 2, division of two ints produces an int. In Python 3, it produces a float. We can get the new behaviour by importing from __future__.

>>> from __future__ import division
>>> a = 4
>>> b = 6
>>> c = a / b
>>> c
0.66666666666666663