Sympy's latex printer, folding short fractions

Question

I'm feeding sympy.latex a string involving fractions and I'd like to get its latex representation with fractions "folded", i.e., typeset as 3/2 rather than as \frac{3}{2}. I'm setting the fold_short_fractions keyword argument to True, but the results I'm getting are inconsistent:

>>> from sympy.parsing.sympy_parser import parse_exp
>>> from sympy import latex
>>>
>>> print(latex(parse_expr("3*x**2/y"))) # OK
\frac{3 x^{2}}{y}
>>> print(latex(parse_expr("3*x**2/y"), fold_short_frac=True)) # OK
3 x^{2} / y
>>>
>>> print(latex(parse_expr("3/2"))) # OK
\frac{3}{2}
>>> print(latex(parse_expr("3/2"), fold_short_frac=True)) # No!!
\frac{3}{2}

As you can see, it refuses to fold the numerical fraction 3/2, although it seems to be okay with symbolic expressions. Does anyone have an explanation/fix/workaround for this? Thanks!

Looks like a bug in the LaTeX printer. Specifically, it ignores this setting for rational numbers. — asmeurer, Aug 09 '16 at 19:00

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 09 '16 at 19:08

This is a bug in the SymPy latex printer. It isn't looking at the fold_short_frac option for rational numbers. I've got a fix here.

In the meantime, you can use this is as workaround:

from sympy.printing.latex import LatexPrinter

class MyLatexPrinter(LatexPrinter):
    def _print_Rational(self, expr):
        if expr.q != 1:
            sign = ""
            p = expr.p
            if expr.p < 0:
                sign = "- "
                p = -p
            if self._settings['fold_short_frac']:
                return r"%s%d / %d" % (sign, p, expr.q)
            return r"%s\frac{%d}{%d}" % (sign, p, expr.q)
        else:
            return self._print(expr.p)

def latex(expr, **settings):
    return MyLatexPrinter(settings).doprint(expr)

Sympy's latex printer, folding short fractions

1 Answers1