<s>[INST] How can I force division to be floating point in Python? Division keeps rounding down to 0 I have two integer values a and b, but I need their ratio in floating point.  I know that a<b and I want to calculate a/b, so if I use integer division I'll always get 0 with a remainder of a.
How can I force c to be a floating point number in Python in the following?
c = a / b

 [/INST] You can cast to float by doing c = a / float(b). If the numerator or denominator is a float, then the result will be also.

A caveat: as commenters have pointed out, this won't work if b might be something other than an integer or floating-point number (or a string representing one). If you might be dealing with other types (such as complex numbers) you'll need to either check for those or use a different method.
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