I have a below snippet of code from my perl script and its causing a problem when the output of $lTAX is 0 (zero) its getting displayed as -0.00. I want output to be 0 not -0.00. Any help would be appreciated.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $lTotA = 50.94;
my $lVatA = 8.49;
my $lAllocD;
my $lAdjNr = 'A23232';
my $lAcctNr = '2000971';
my $TAX = 90018;
my $UNKNOWN = 90020;
my $VAT_EXEMPT = 9000019;
$lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$TAX} = 3.7;
$lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$UNKNOWN} = 0.0;
$lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$VAT_EXEMPT} = 38.75;
my $lTAX = sprintf("%0.2f",$lTotA-$lVatA- $lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$TAX}- $lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$UNKNOWN}-$lAllocD{$lAcctNr}{$lAdjNr}{$VAT_EXEMPT});
print "\n**TAXABLE AMT is:$lTAX\n";
If you're calculating financial numbers, it may be a good idea to calculate with integers. Count in cents or tenths of a cent with no decimal points, then divide by 10 or 100 to get the dollar result. You won't end up with strange things like negative zero.
Thanks bipinajith, Corona688 for the reply.
The code I pasted is collecting data and processing millions of records, its displaying negative zero in very few cases where result of the formula is zero. I want result to be displayed up to 2 decimal places, hence using %d is not an option as suggested. I am trying to understand suggestion by Corona, if you can please give me an example so that I can implement same in the code.
It wouldn't be printing a minus sign if the results of the formula was zero. It's a negative number, but smaller than the number of decimal points you're printing.
I don't know what sort of example I can show you. Calcualting in cents means just that.
my $cents=100;
# ... bunch of calculations
$cents=int($cents); # Make sure no leftover fraction
printf("%.2f dollars\n", $cents/100);