All the answers given so far are fine if there are 11* digits after the decimal point. But what if the mantissa is longer than 11 digits?:

printf "%.11e\n", 0.99982928833123; # 9.99829288331e-001

Still truncated...

And what if there are considerably fewer digits:

printf "%.11e\n", 0.999; # 9.9980000000e-001

Would the OP want all those extra zeroes?

One solution (admittedly not very elegant):

my $dec = 0.99982928833123; my $len = length( ( split /\./, $dec )[1] ); printf "%.${len}e\n", $dec; # 9.99829288331230e-001

* Well, or 12 in this case.


In reply to Re: Decimal to Scientific notation by Not_a_Number
in thread Decimal to Scientific notation by kepler

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.