The comments state the objective is to print to 2 decimal places.

There's a simple answer for Python 3:

>>> num=3.65
>>> "The number is {:.2f}".format(num)
'The number is 3.65'

or equivalently with f-strings (Python 3.6+):

>>> num = 3.65
>>> f"The number is {num:.2f}"
'The number is 3.65'

As always, the float value is an approximation:

>>> "{}".format(num)
'3.65'
>>> "{:.10f}".format(num)
'3.6500000000'
>>> "{:.20f}".format(num)
'3.64999999999999991118'

I think most use cases will want to work with floats and then only print to a specific precision.

Those that want the numbers themselves to be stored to exactly 2 decimal digits of precision, I suggest use the decimal type. More reading on floating point precision for those that are interested.

In the standard library, the decimal module may be what you're looking for. Also, I have found mpmath to be quite helpful. The documentation has many great examples as well (unfortunately my office computer does not have mpmath installed; otherwise I would verify a few examples and post them).

One caveat about the decimal module, though. The module contains several in-built functions for simple mathematical operations (e.g. sqrt), but the results from these functions may not always match the corresponding function in math or other modules at higher precisions (although they may be more accurate). For example,

from decimal import *
import math

getcontext().prec = 30
num = Decimal(1) / Decimal(7)

print("   math.sqrt: {0}".format(Decimal(math.sqrt(num))))
print("decimal.sqrt: {0}".format(num.sqrt()))

In Python 3.2.3, this outputs the first two lines

   math.sqrt: 0.37796447300922719758631274089566431939601898193359375
decimal.sqrt: 0.377964473009227227214516536234
actual value: 0.3779644730092272272145165362341800608157513118689214

which as stated, isn't exactly what you would expect, and you can see that the higher the precision, the less the results match. Note that the decimal module does have more accuracy in this example, since it more closely matches the actual value.

You are running into the old problem with floating point numbers that not all numbers can be represented exactly. The command line is just showing you the full floating point form from memory.

With floating point representation, your rounded version is the same number. Since computers are binary, they store floating point numbers as an integer and then divide it by a power of two so 13.95 will be represented in a similar fashion to 125650429603636838/(2**53).

Double precision numbers have 53 bits (16 digits) of precision and regular floats have 24 bits (8 digits) of precision. The floating point type in Python uses double precision to store the values.

For example,

>>> 125650429603636838/(2**53)
13.949999999999999

>>> 234042163/(2**24)
13.949999988079071

>>> a = 13.946
>>> print(a)
13.946
>>> print("%.2f" % a)
13.95
>>> round(a,2)
13.949999999999999
>>> print("%.2f" % round(a, 2))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(a))
13.95
>>> print("{:.2f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.95
>>> print("{:.15f}".format(round(a, 2)))
13.949999999999999

If you are after only two decimal places (to display a currency value, for example), then you have a couple of better choices:

1. Use integers and store values in cents, not dollars and then divide by 100 to convert to dollars.
2. Or use a fixed point number like decimal.