You guys are so confused you don't even get yourselves.
But they still say. "I'm trying to do X. To do this, I'm doing this complicated Y. How come Y doesn't work?"
This is still XY because they're asking about Y. But in the bad cases, they'd only mention the Y part, and omit that they're trying to do X.
This is "I'm trying to do X" -> "Here's how you do X"
So person is trying to solve X, but asks
"How do you do Y?"
"Why are you trying to do Y?"
"Well, I want X and Y seems to be the solution"
"No, to solve X you want to do Z."
In this case the asker nicely gave their X as part of the question, but the bulk of the question was still about trying to move forward on their mistaken "solution" Y.
1. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x... (and note all the other answers saying the same thing.)
Y: How do I strip unnecessary symbols after a decimal point?
X: How do I round a number to a desired precision?
It looks like the perfect example of XY problem to me. Please tell me how I'm confused.
In an XY-problem situation, X and Y are different problems.
The first action concerns a syntactic property of PI's decimal representation while the second action concerns a semantic property of PI's value.
A related example given on https://xyproblem.info is a user asking (Y) how to extract the final 3 characters of a filename string when he probably intends to ask (X) how to retrieve a filename's extension.
Of course there are cases where the question poser of Y benefits from having their X identified, an archetypal case here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2691018/decimalformat-an...