["python","string","decimal"]
Easy way of finding decimal places

Is there an easy way or integrated function to find out the decimal places of a floating point number? The number is parsed from a string, so one way is to count the digits after the . sign, but that looks quite clumsy to me. Is there a possibility to get the information needed out of a float or Decimal object?
To repeat what others have said (because I had already typed it out!), I'm not even sure such a value would be meaningful in the case of a floating point number, because of the difference between the decimal and binary representation; often a number representable by a finite number of decimal digits will have only an infinite-digit representation in binary. In the case of a decimal.Decimal object, you can retrieve the exponent using the as_tuple method, which returns a namedtuple with sign, digits, and exponent attributes: >>> d = decimal.Decimal('56.4325') >>> d.as_tuple().exponent -4 >>> d = decimal.Decimal('56.43256436') >>> d.as_tuple().exponent -8 >>> d = decimal.Decimal(str(56.4325)) >>> d.as_tuple().exponent -4 The negation of the exponent is the number of digits after the decimal point, unless the exponent is greater than 0.