Formatting to two decimal places

[Jad Tamimi]

Hello,

For some reason I'm having this weird issue where I format the entries in my data to two decimal places and then try to display the entry to find that the command displays a number to 3 decimal places, even though when I browse the data the numbers are all to two decimal places.

. format _all %9.2f 

. display %9.2f scount sample==1
     0.681

The actual entry is 0.68, when I write 'display %9.1f scount sample==1' it displays 0.71 which is also weird.

Please can you let me know how I can get the command to display exactly what's in the entry in the browse data section.

Thanks,
Jad

[Andrew Musau]

When you display a variable, what you get is the first observation of that variable. In this case, you are asking to simultaneously display one variable "scount" and to evaluate whether "sample[1]==1" is true (1 if true, 0 if false). The values are concatenated, and therefore you get

%9.2f scount[1]=0.68

and

sample[1]==1 = 1 (or true)

and thus 0.681. The display format will only apply to the first variable. Instead, I think you want:

format _all %9.2f
list scount if sample==1

You can use -if- or -in- to constrain the observations to be displayed.

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