How to manually adjust the decimal point?

I used (5*rand) to generate the random numbers in the range 0 to 5 and got the answers like 4.5693, 3.4211 etc. The default format long and short only can display 5 digits and 15 digits. How to have 7 digits to get the answers like 4.569312, 3.421178 etc? Please help.

Answer 1

[Wayne King]

   x = 5*rand;
   fprintf('%1.6f\n',x)

Or if you want to keep it as a string:

   y = sprintf('%1.6f\n',x);

Note now: y

gives you what you want, but if you convert it back to a number with

   str2num(y)

the formatting will change back.

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

You could also overload display for class double and format short to make it display 7 digits instead of 15. Since double is the default class in MATLAB it seems a little bit buggier to me than when I suggested overloading display for char. Basically create a folder @double and add it to the MATLAB path. inside that folder add the following function called display.m.

    function display(x)
      if strcmpi(get(0, 'Format'), 'Short')
        name = inputname(1);
        if isempty(name)
          name = 'ans';
        end
        builtin('disp', sprintf('%s =\n%20.7f\n', name, x));
      else
        builtin('display', x);
      end
    end