Help!! With Averaging Numbers From a Text file in python without using sum()

Question

Hello! I am truly stuck on this question, I can get an *average* with what I have, however, my numbers are way off. The answer is 0.750718518519. But I keep getting 0.7507185185185187. What am I missing?

count = 0
total = 0
### obtaining the file######
fname = input("Enter file name: ")
fh = open(fname)
### The loop ####
for line in fh:
if not line.startswith("X-DSPAM-Confidence:") :
continue
# Getting the average #####
count = count + 1
lane = line.find(':')
fin = line[lane + 1: ]
value = float(fin)
total = total + value

## Final number#####

if count :
average = total / count
print (average)

Answer 1

Looks like "normal" floating point rounding errors to me. Look into the decimal module for more precision. And don't forget to close your input file 🤓

Answer 2

Your calculator is just truncating the number earlier than python...

Answer 3

Hello Jackson! Thank you for replying. Where do I stop it from doing that???

Answer 4

Easiest would be:

print(round(average, x))

Where you replace x with the number of decimal places you want.

Answer 5

Unfortunately no, I am still unable to get the answer: 0.750718518519
With that solution, I get the output: 0.8

Thank you for your help anyway :)