from __future__ import *

Printing floats with Erlang

December 17, 2007 at 10:37 PM | categories: mochiweb, erlang | View Comments

The float printing options that ship with Erlang all suck. You either don't have sufficient precision, or you have an extremely verbose representation:

1> io:format("~w ~.18g ~g ~s~n", [0.1234567, 0.1234567, 0.1234567, float_to_list(0.1234567)]).
0.123457 0.123456700000000003 0.123457 1.23456700000000002548e-01
2> io:format("~w ~.18g ~g ~s~n", [0.1, 0.1, 0.1, float_to_list(0.1)]).
0.100000 0.100000000000000006 0.100000 1.00000000000000005551e-01

mochiweb includes an implementation of the algorithm from the "Printing Floating-Point Numbers Quickly and Accurately" paper in the mochinum module (which is standalone, if you just want to use it without the rest of mochiweb):

3> io:format("~s~n", [mochinum:digits(0.1234567)]).
0.1234567
4> io:format("~s~n", [mochinum:digits(0.1)]).
0.1

Problem solved :)

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Using the mochiweb project skeleton

December 17, 2007 at 09:06 PM | categories: mochiweb, erlang | View Comments

A bit over a week ago we moved a slightly modified version of our project skeleton into the open source mochiweb repository, which gets you a start shell script, a skeleton application following (most of) the OTP paradigms, a Makefile, and a web server that serves static files out of priv/www.

The first thing you have to do is make sure mochiweb is built:

$ cd ~/src/mochiweb
$ make
(cd src;make)
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `all'.

After that you just run ./scripts/new_mochiweb.erl with the project name and destination (you can put a symlink of that script on your PATH somewhere).

$ ./scripts/new_mochiweb.erl mochidemo ~/src
...

Starting it is easy, just build with make and then run start.sh or start-dev.sh from ~/src/mochidemo. The only difference between the two at the moment is that start-dev.sh will poll for changes in ebin files and purge them automatically when they're updated. The default port is 8000 listening on all IPs and it's configured in src/PROJECT_sup.erl.

$ cd ~/src/mochidemo
$ make
...
$ ./start-dev.sh
...
=PROGRESS REPORT==== 17-Dec-2007::20:58:33 ===
         application: mochidemo
          started_at: nonode@nohost

1> http:request("http://127.0.0.1:8000/").
...
{ok,{{"HTTP/1.1",200,"OK"},
     [{"date","Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:58:55 GMT"},
      {"server","MochiWeb/1.0 (Any of you quaids got a smint?)"},
      {"content-length","88"},
      {"content-type","text/html"}],
     "<html>\n<head>\n<title>It Worked</title>\n</head>\n<body>\nMochiWeb running.\n</body>\n</html>\n"}}

As far as deployment goes, it's a convenience that mochiweb makes a symlink to itself as PROJECT/deps/mochiweb-src so that the start scripts can find it and put them in your code path. You'll probably want to put a full copy of mochiweb in its place, use a svn:external (which is what we do right now), or manage the mochiweb dependency by some other means.

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