Truncate (not round off) decimal numbers in javascript

Dogbert’s answer is good, but if your code might have to deal with negative numbers, Math.floor by itself may give unexpected results.

E.g. Math.floor(4.3) = 4, but Math.floor(-4.3) = -5

Use a helper function like this one instead to get consistent results:

truncateDecimals = function (number) {
    return Math[number < 0 ? 'ceil' : 'floor'](number);
};

// Applied to Dogbert's answer:
var a = 5.467;
var truncated = truncateDecimals(a * 100) / 100; // = 5.46

Here’s a more convenient version of this function:

truncateDecimals = function (number, digits) {
    var multiplier = Math.pow(10, digits),
        adjustedNum = number * multiplier,
        truncatedNum = Math[adjustedNum < 0 ? 'ceil' : 'floor'](adjustedNum);

    return truncatedNum / multiplier;
};

// Usage:
var a = 5.467;
var truncated = truncateDecimals(a, 2); // = 5.46

// Negative digits:
var b = 4235.24;
var truncated = truncateDecimals(b, -2); // = 4200

If that isn’t desired behaviour, insert a call to Math.abs on the first line:

var multiplier = Math.pow(10, Math.abs(digits)),

EDIT: shendz correctly points out that using this solution with a = 17.56 will incorrectly produce 17.55. For more about why this happens, read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic. Unfortunately, writing a solution that eliminates all sources of floating-point error is pretty tricky with javascript. In another language you’d use integers or maybe a Decimal type, but with javascript…

This solution should be 100% accurate, but it will also be slower:

function truncateDecimals (num, digits) {
    var numS = num.toString(),
        decPos = numS.indexOf('.'),
        substrLength = decPos == -1 ? numS.length : 1 + decPos + digits,
        trimmedResult = numS.substr(0, substrLength),
        finalResult = isNaN(trimmedResult) ? 0 : trimmedResult;

    return parseFloat(finalResult);
}

For those who need speed but also want to avoid floating-point errors, try something like BigDecimal.js. You can find other javascript BigDecimal libraries in this SO question: “Is there a good Javascript BigDecimal library?” and here’s a good blog post about math libraries for Javascript