Hello kepler,

In what way does it not work, and what is your OS? In the meantime, here is my guess: Did you perhaps miss the decimal point in stevieb’s solution?

 2:02 >perl -wE "my $dec = 0.99982928833; my $sci = sprintf qq[%11e], 
+$dec; say $sci;"
9.998293e-001

 2:03 >perl -wE "my $dec = 0.99982928833; my $sci = sprintf qq[%.11e],
+ $dec; say $sci;"
9.99829288330e-001

 2:03 >perl -v

This is perl 5, version 20, subversion 2 (v5.20.2) built for MSWin32-x
+64-multi-thread
[download]

(Windows 8.1, 64-bit, Strawberry Perl.)

Hope that helps,