Truncating numbers

This is something I fell foul of recently. I had a calculation that produced a non integer answer e.g.  2.1

I needed to get the integer part of the number.  Without really thinking about it I did this

PS> [int]2.1
2

I was then a bit surprised when I didn’t always get the right answer.  Still not thinking I was scratching my head until I realised that using [int] rounds to the nearest integer.

PS> for ($i=2.1; $i -le 3.0; $i+=0.1){"$i  $([int]$i)"}
2.1  2
2.2  2
2.3  2
2.4  2
2.5  3
2.6  3
2.7  3
2.8  3
2.9  3

This is no good because I need to round down.

The .NET Math class has a Truncate method that works however.

PS> for ($i=2.1; $i -le 3.0; $i+=0.1){"$i  $([math]::Truncate($i))"}
2.1  2
2.2  2
2.3  2
2.4  2
2.5  2
2.6  2
2.7  2
2.8  2
2.9  2

And the moral of the story is that you need to think about what you are doing and not assume that things work the way you think they do