The precision and scale with the divide operation on a bigdecimal

[marcosol]

Hi
I don't understand the scale with de BigDecimal.divide(), example below. Only if I give scale zero it returns 0.25.
But I should give the precision of this method. Is the precision the same as the scale? How do I use the scale correctly?

public double getFraction(){
		BigDecimal value1 = new BigDecimal("5000");
		BigDecimal value2 = new BigDecimal("20000");
		return value1.divide(value2,0).doubleValue();
	}

Thanks !

[JosAH]

Normally you shouldn't set the scale value; a BigDecimal is a BigInteger multiplied by pow(10, -scale); the divide( ... ) method you're using sets the rounding mode for the division operator, not its scale (read teh API documentation for the BigDecimal class for details).

kind regards,

Jos