How to specify the format in writedlm?

[jmo]

Hi,
I’m trying to write an array to a text file using writedlm. The array contains small floating point numbers but Julia saves it in a very odd format.

Can I specify the format to e.g. “%g”?

My problem can be illustrated by:

julia> VERSION
v"0.5.2"

julia> a=rand(10)/1e8
10-element Array{Float64,1}:
7.95137e-9
3.26463e-9
8.57709e-9
5.623e-9
1.18668e-9
4.79027e-9
2.98404e-9
3.67931e-9
7.92933e-9
9.32614e-9

julia> writedlm(“test.txt”,a)

shell> cat test.txt
7951367936085416e-24
32646314198289182e-25
857708986868636e-23
5622998959757808e-24
11866818183793715e-25
4790274376055203e-24
29840432453930554e-25
36793133432091363e-25
7929332595738798e-24
9326137418330871e-24

[giordano]

See

More control over writedlm formatting

Hi, I’ve recently discovered that writedlm() tends to output floating-point numbers using a very strange format pattern which removes the fractional part by decreasing exponent. Not only it is terribly confusing, the data is no longer easy to read and understand by a human. An example: 6.0444e-5 -> 60444e-9 2.15234e-5 -> 215234e-10 3.3253e-5 -> 33253e-9 It is not a bug - print_shortest has done it job by reducing the output by exactly one character - a decimal mark. But it is not human reada…

[jmo]

Ok, thanks!
It seems the recommendation is to abandon writedlm and use the CSV package instead.