Incorrect Division Results

I've got a time calculator that has worked reasonably well for a number of years. One thing that always bothered me, though, was that if one used fractional seconds, the results wo

Solution 1:

I haven't used BigDecimal in any production code yet but found this question interesting so I though I give it a try. You are right about the need for a MathContext as parameter to the division function. Here is what I did, based on your example:

console.log(firstB.divide(secondB, new MathContext(100)).toString());

Creating a context that tells the BigDecimal to use 100 digits in scientific mode outputs:

0.9019659412190150568742192123085015451377473864159379314879347754618975606548754027220724570977710566

There's also options to control different output modes PLAIN, SCIENTIFIC and ENGINEERING + various rounding modes.

Full example on jsfiddle

Update: The default output format is SCIENTIFIC, not PLAIN. Examples here

Update 2: Created a tiny performance test here, looks like BigDecimal is about 10000 times slower than native javascript division.