ArithmeticException: "Non-terminating decimal expansion; no exact representable decimal result"

Why does the following code raise the exception shown below?

BigDecimal a = new BigDecimal("1.6");
BigDecimal b = new BigDecimal("9.2");
a.divide(b) // results in the following exception.

Exception:

java.lang.ArithmeticException: Non-terminating decimal expansion; no exact representable decimal result.

From the Java 11 BigDecimal docs:

When a MathContext object is supplied with a precision setting of 0 (for example, MathContext.UNLIMITED), arithmetic operations are exact, as are the arithmetic methods which take no MathContext object. (This is the only behavior that was supported in releases prior to 5.)

As a corollary of computing the exact result, the rounding mode setting of a MathContext object with a precision setting of 0 is not used and thus irrelevant. In the case of divide, the exact quotient could have an infinitely long decimal expansion; for example, 1 divided by 3.

If the quotient has a nonterminating decimal expansion and the operation is specified to return an exact result, an ArithmeticException is thrown. Otherwise, the exact result of the division is returned, as done for other operations.

To fix, you need to do something like this:

a.divide(b, 2, RoundingMode.HALF_UP)

where 2 is the scale and RoundingMode.HALF_UP is rounding mode

For more details see this blog post.

Because you're not specifying a precision and a rounding-mode. BigDecimal is complaining that it could use 10, 20, 5000, or infinity decimal places, and it still wouldn't be able to give you an exact representation of the number. So instead of giving you an incorrect BigDecimal, it just whinges at you.

However, if you supply a RoundingMode and a precision, then it will be able to convert (eg. 1.333333333-to-infinity to something like 1.3333 ... but you as the programmer need to tell it what precision you're 'happy with'.

You can do

a.divide(b, MathContext.DECIMAL128)

You can choose the number of bits you want either 32,64,128.

Check out this link :

http://edelstein.pebbles.cs.cmu.edu/jadeite/main.php?api=java6&state=class&package=java.math&class=MathContext

For fixing such an issue I have used below code

a.divide(b, 2, RoundingMode.HALF_EVEN)

2 is precision. Now problem was resolved.

I had this same problem, because my line of code was:

txtTotalInvoice.setText(var1.divide(var2).doubleValue() + "");

I change to this, reading previous Answer, because I was not writing decimal precision:

txtTotalInvoice.setText(var1.divide(var2,4, RoundingMode.HALF_UP).doubleValue() + "");

4 is Decimal Precison

AND RoundingMode are Enum constants, you could choose any of this UP, DOWN, CEILING, FLOOR, HALF_DOWN, HALF_EVEN, HALF_UP

In this Case HALF_UP, will have this result:

2.4 = 2   
2.5 = 3   
2.7 = 3

You can check the RoundingMode information here: http://www.javabeat.net/precise-rounding-of-decimals-using-rounding-mode-enumeration/