How to print 0 without a negative sign in the front? Everytime I want to print 0 it prints -0.000.

1.0000 0 -0.0000 0 2.0000

0 1.0000 0.0000 0 0

0 0 1.0000 0 6.0000

0 0 -0.0000 1.0000 5.0000

I used format rat at first but then it made my 0's into astericks so then I tried format short which showed me that my error was in the zeros printing as 0.0000 and -0.0000. Could someone please tell me how to get rid of both -0.0000 and 0.0000 and replaced with just a 0.

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

That minus zero is NOT truly zero. It is just a tiny number that is slightly less than zero, but when rounded to only 4 digits for display, it "looks" like a zero.

format short
A = [1 0 -1e-6 0 2;0 1 1e-6 0 0]

A = 2×5

1.0000 0 -0.0000 0 2.0000 0 1.0000 0.0000 0 0

As you can see, in the third column, when I used format short, the numbers are shown as -0.0000 and 0.0000, even though they are not zero in either case.

If I use a better format, such as short g or long g, the approximate zeros are now seen to be just small numbers.

format short g
A

A = 2×5

1 0 -1e-06 0 2 0 1 1e-06 0 0