Output for small decimal numbers is misleading

[louist87]

I think that this question on stackoverflow sums up the problem fairly concisely.

In a nutshell, the 0 and -0 output for very small decimal numbers is misleading and looks a lot like an error. It might be better just to show scientific notation directly.

[wesm]

I have to look at what to do here. Note that setting engineering format helps:

In [5]: pd.set_eng_float_format()

In [6]: pd.read_table('http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160029/gradStat_mmn.tdf').head()
Out[6]: 
   Subject Group Local Global  Attn         mean
0        1  DSub     S      S  Attn  325.290E-24
1        1  DSub     S      S  Dist  601.010E-24
2        1  DSub     D      S  Attn  421.570E-24
3        1  DSub     D      S  Dist  830.810E-24
4        1  DSub     S      D  Attn  298.350E-24

[wesm]

Fixed the underlying issue:

In [1]: df = pd.read_table('http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160029/gradStat_mmn.tdf')

In [2]: df.head()
Out[2]: 
   Subject Group Local Global  Attn          mean
0        1  DSub     S      S  Attn  3.252900e-22
1        1  DSub     S      S  Dist  6.010100e-22
2        1  DSub     D      S  Attn  4.215700e-22
3        1  DSub     D      S  Dist  8.308100e-22
4        1  DSub     S      D  Attn  2.983500e-22