How to suppress scientific notation when printing float values?

Using the newer version ''.format (also remember to specify how many digit after the . you wish to display, this depends on how small is the floating number). See this example:

>>> a = -7.1855143557448603e-17
>>> '{:f}'.format(a)
'-0.000000'

as shown above, default is 6 digits! This is not helpful for our case example, so instead we could use something like this:

>>> '{:.20f}'.format(a)
'-0.00000000000000007186'

Update

Starting in Python 3.6, this can be simplified with the new formatted string literal, as follows:

>>> f'{a:.20f}'
'-0.00000000000000007186'

'%f' % (x/y)

but you need to manage precision yourself. e.g.,

'%f' % (1/10**8)

will display zeros only.
details are in the docs

Or for Python 3 the equivalent old formatting or the newer style formatting

With newer versions of Python (2.6 and later), you can use ''.format() to accomplish what @SilentGhost suggested:

'{0:f}'.format(x/y)

Another option, if you are using pandas and would like to suppress scientific notation for all floats, is to adjust the pandas options.

import pandas as pd
pd.options.display.float_format = '{:.2f}'.format