How to compare two different floats, to a certain degree of accuracy. I know that there are very slight imprecisions while using floats or doubles in any programming language, but which may however, be enough to cause this comparison of floats a < b to return a different value than it actually should.
I was solving a problem from the UVa Online Judge which gave me a Wrong Answer many times. It took few float values as input, albeit, to 2 decimal places. I figured out the makeshift solution, which was by splitting the input and converting it to ints, but I wouldn't prefer to use that always.
So my question is, what's the best way to compare whether a float a is lesser (or greater) than a float b, provided that the inputs of a and b are given correct to n decimal places, in this case, 2?
The language I prefer is C++.
Use std::numeric_limits<T>::epsilon() to check whether two numbers are almost equal. If you want to know whether one is greater/less you should also take into account the relative tolerance.
#include <cmath>
#include <limits>
template < typename T >
bool fuzzy_compare(T a, T b)
{
return std::abs(a - b) < std::numeric_limits<T>::epsilon();
};