# Formatting numbers in "nicer" scientific notation

Hello all,

sorry for the vague title, but I didn't know how else to formulate it.
I'm looking for a facility to format numbers in a nicer way, namely to
turno 3.14e-5 into something like $3.14 \times 10^{\minus 5}$.

I'm almost sure I've seen something like that in matplotlib somewhere
but I'm not able to find it anymore. Is my recollection wrong? Does
anyone know if that is implemented by some other library?

Thank you. Cheers,
Dan

Hi Daniele,

You might be looking for the MathText-capability of (some of the?)
Matplotlib formatters. See for example:
- https://matplotlib.org/gallery/ticks_and_spines/scalarformatter.html

···

-
https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.ticklabel_format.html
Please find attached a small example on how MathText may help to get
where you want (if I have understood your goal correctly).

Another more advanced fashion may be to write your own formatter with
something like FuncFormatter
(https://matplotlib.org/api/ticker_api.html#matplotlib.ticker.FuncFormatter)
but that would definitively be more work...

Hopefully this helps.

Best regards,

On 06/29/2018 05:30 PM, Daniele Nicolodi wrote:

Hello all,

sorry for the vague title, but I didn't know how else to formulate it.
I'm looking for a facility to format numbers in a nicer way, namely to
turno 3.14e-5 into something like $3.14 \times 10^{\minus 5}$.

I'm almost sure I've seen something like that in matplotlib somewhere
but I'm not able to find it anymore. Is my recollection wrong? Does
anyone know if that is implemented by some other library?

Thank you. Cheers,
Dan
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