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

Question

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

Answer 1

The result was expecting to be an exact value, but what you have in this case is a result that repeats infinitely. You need to give it some method of handing this sort of thing such as

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

where 2 is precision and RoundingMode.HALF_UP is rounding mode