Numeric display decimal places

[postformac]

Hi,

I'm reading a floating point number from an external source over serial (its a PIC giving a voltage reading as an ASCII string output)

It works great but I am having difficulty finding a way to display the data to a set number of decimal places.

I have tried changing my indicator to a number of different display formats, but they all have issues with certain values.

For example, if my incoming string reads "1.123" and I set my display format to floating point with 3 digits of precision, don't hide trailing zeros, it works perfectly and shows "1.123" on my indicator. If the incoming string reads "1.023" it then displays "1.0230" on my indicator, I assume that it doesn't count the first zero as a digit. If I hide trailing zeros then it works with either of the above examples but if the string reads "1.100" then I just get "1.1" on my indicator. Either way the number of digits on my indicator changes according to the data coming in.

I just want it to show 3 decimal places, so either "1.123", "1.023" or "1.100" depending on the input string. Is there any way to fix it like this? I don't want the display to keep changing the number of digits after the decimal point.

Thanks

[PA-Paul]

Hiya,

Just had a play with this in lv 8.6.1, the following setting for the display format (right click on the indicator, then select "Display format") should do what you want:

This does assume you're using a "numeric" indicator to display your data...

Hope that helps

Paul

[postformac]

Thanks for the reply.

I had tried it set like that, and was getting the data back as I described in the original post. However, I just tried with a new VI as a test and it works fine.

I went back to the original VI and checked all the settings, which were the same, but that was still adding zeros on the end when there was a leading zero (ie. "1.023" would read "1.0230")

I went into the advanced editing mode and found that on the new VI it had "%.3f" as the format string but on the original it had "%_3f". I changed it manually and it works perfectly now, not sure what caused that!

Thanks anyway

[Neville D]

QUOTE (postformac @ Apr 11 2009, 09:50 AM)

I went back to the original VI and checked all the settings, which were the same, but that was still adding zeros on the end when there was a leading zero (ie. "1.023" would read "1.0230")

Check "Hide Trailing zeros" in the menu shown above in another post.

Neville.