Formatting integers and floats inside strings in python

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to print formatted strings rounding to significant figures. Say I have:

x = 8829834.123

And I want to print it rounded to four sig figs, as an integer. I tried:

print "%4d"%x

and I just get:

8829834

Why won't it display:

8829000?

I thought that was how string formatting worked.

Answer 1

To round to 4 significant digits:

f = float("%.4g" % 8829834.123)

To print it as an integer:

print "%.0f" % f
# -> 8830000

Answer 2

Format Specifier does not support integer rounding, there may be some solutions but not out of the Box, here are couple of them

>>> print "{:d}000".format(int(x/1000))
8829000
>>> print "{:d}".format(int(round(x,-3)))
8830000